Campaign Reboot

Numbers, and why they matter.

2012-02-09T17:15:00.003Z

Hat tip to Starbuck_WOI for this

I work in market research, pretty much what I do day to day is find stories in data and try and articulate that to the client. A surprising amount of what I end up saying to the client doesnt involve numbers, although I always have numbers in the back pocket in case they're needed. A mixture of trust in us as consultants and general lack of desire to see lots of numbers mean it's better to avoid too much data on a slide. That means when I read this:

Poll finds broad support for Obama’s counterterrorism policies

I want to know what data is actually saying that, because I'm looking at story, not the reality of the data.

So, are the public agreeing that Obama's counter terrorism policies are "right" or not?

Well, turns out that, from a sample of 1,000 (statistically robust with a margin of error of +/- 3% approx):

42% strongly approve of the decision to keep Guantanmo open
59% strongly approve of the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists
56% strongly approve the draw down of troops in Afghanistan

Now, those numbers are strong, very strong, and here's why I believe thats happening. Its because people think, when the Government says 'suspected terrorists' what they are actually saying is 'they are terrorists, but we can't tell you why, because then we'd have to kill you'. And thats the language continued in 2 out of three of these questions is saying. So people are basically agreeing they're find with killing terrorists and putting them in jail, they're also absolutely A-OK with getting troops out of Afghanistan. Well, that makes more sense to me.

If you re-worded the question to something that reflected reality it might read a bit more like this:

Do you support the use of drones to kill civilians, who may at some point commit acts of violence against American troops or civilians

you might get a different answer. If you asked an emotive question (as the WP has done) it might read like this:

Do you support the use of drones to kill civilians, including first responders and those attending funerals, who may at some point commit acts of violence against American troops or civilians

Then you might be playing a whole different game.

Due to the low base size this statement is factually not correct:

Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al- Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The variance is 2%, meaning it falls well within the margin of error on the data. Its not totally wrong, its just directional. If you had another month or two's worth of data using the same question, you could assert it was rising or falling if the trend continues.

Interestingly the article cites audiences which I can't see in their sample, for example:

But fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year.

So, 77% of liberal Democrats, who likely trust this Government highly, are in favour of killing people the Government has suggested are terrorists. That doesnt surprise me, thats normal.

I've done my share of so called "PR-able" research. It tends to be massaged at the very least. Journalists think in terms of a story, and have the story to some extent lined up, they then want data which demonstrates that story. Its always possible to then find that data, if you're willing to ask the right question. In this case, some very specific questions have been asked, which will elicit a very obvious set of responses, those have then been packaged up and presented as raw fact.

Be afraid of data, it is not your friend, particularly in the hands of a journalist.

Mo Money, no fewer problems

2012-02-09T09:22:00.003Z

The Daily Telegraph, as with many other papers loves to run pieces like this:

The Coalition Government, indisputably influenced by the Liberal Democrats, is particularly to blame [for a weaker military]. There is a serious possibility that military action by Britain will be required in the near future not only to defend the Falkland Islands from the Argentine threat, but also to contain the situation in Iran.

Surely the time has now come at least to call a halt to any further reduction in expenditure on our Armed Forces.

Notice that last line? If we just spend more, everything will be okay, we'll be able to go everywhere, do anything, kill anyone. Hooray. Go UK, go UK! And so forth.

Lets say we double our military spending up to about 5% of GDP. That'd put us at about £110billion. Hell, thats plenty right? Well, it'd be about a 10th of what the US spend, and, to be fair, they're pretty good at most stuff. Ultimately, the fact that they have to point to a rise in civilian deaths as a signal of impending victory in Afghanistan, might point some slight structural weaknesses, but no biggie:

[General] Scaparrotti, who said he accepted the U.N.’s statistics, pointed out that the vast majority of Afghan civilians — 77 percent — die because of insurgent actions. When Danger Room asked if the increase in total civilian deaths indicated that the insurgents still have a free hand to attack, Scaparrotti replied, “I’d say it’s actually reduced. It’s pushed them into a certain [set of tactics] which isn’t ideal.”

Namely: suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices. While Scaparrotti conceded there was a “freedom of action that they have, in some places,” he said the “freedom of action [insurgents] show today is increasingly in IEDs and suicide bombing. They don’t have the capability to take us on directly.”

The U.N. concluded that insurgent bombs are now the “single largest killer of Afghan children, women and men in 2011.” Suicide bombings have “dramatically” increased, and are now killing 80 percent more Afghans than in 2010.

Perhaps the Taliban might not be able to take on U.S. forces directly, but they’ve expanded their ability to plant low-level bombs and launch high-profile suicide attacks. “I don’t know that that’s an increased freedom of action,” Scaparrotti said.

Its a nice idea that money magically makes for a better military, but lets face it, its nonsense. If the largest most mobile, most effective, most powerful military on the planet cannot cope in Afghanistan, then simple spending is not enough.

The problem is, that if you're going to spend money, there's got to be a reason for it. To use an example, I recently spent an ungodly amount on a new computer, my reason? I have a strategy. My strategy is to have a single source device for my entertainment needs while at home. See? An articulated strategy enables me to make a choice about how much to spend. Turns out, its a lot. But thats between me and the bank account I used to have.

My point is that without a clearly defined national strategy, ideally for the all for all foreign relations, but even if it is only for the military, we've got no damn idea what we want to spend. In the last decade we've had two large scale long term engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, we've had a number of short term high intensity deployments, Libya being the most significant, and we face a potential conflict with Argentina in the next year or so, even if it never goes hot.

In order to address these challenges we have to have a real national strategy which is able to articulate and encompass our national intent. We need to decide if copying the American doctrine of 2 "concurrent threats" really helps us, or is realistic. I'd argue that isnt a strategy either, its a desire certainly, but its not articulated in the form of a strategy.

If I was going to take a stab at it I would suggest that our strategy should be something like "Ensure that the United Kingdom and its properties overseas are within the reach of protection at all times, with sufficient reserve to pursue aggressive action where it supports this objective". Thats off the top of my head, and there are already holes I can see in it, but at least now I can start scribbling on the back of a napkin, to see what I need to do that.

I can tell I need a fleet, with Carriers, and aircraft for force projection. I'm going to need some boots on the ground, but I might be able to make some savings there, if I'm not going to be putting those boots overseas very often because I'm confident air power and naval force can provide protection in most cases. Special forces and the marines will probably provide a lot of that, if we're going to use the fleet to provide our core mobility.

We have no strategy. We flail. In the absense of strategy we do what we're told, whether actively because America asks nicely, or reactively, because Argentina is being a d*ck or we just can't stand Gadhaffi any more and see an opportunity to facilitate him being shot while on the run. Either way, we're not our own boss in either of those situations.

But even if we had a strategy, we still shouldnt start spending money. We've got to think about the military which we need to achieve that strategy. What training do they need, what sorts of people need to be in it? But thats a whole other blog post. The point is, we've got no damn idea what we want to achieve and how to do it.

Of course developing a Grand Strategy is fraught with peril, as this sage post on Rethinking Security (and Aaron Ellis) reminds us:

Aaron Ellis, writing about British foreign policy thought, dubs this the “internationalisation of the national interest.” And I can do no better than Patrick Porter’s precision demolition of the British National Security Strategy (NSS) for describing the lethal consequences of grand strategy rooted in a set of dangerous hidden policy assumptions:

“It claims the country’s security depends on a liberal, ‘rules based’ world order that upholds its values. This is a potentially bottomless concept. …It describes a world of interdependence and connectivity. Britain is endangered by globe-girding, chaotic processes such as state failure. Broken countries are incubators of extremism, disease, or crime. … According to the document, Britain’s security is directly linked to the type of regime in other states. It cannot tolerate the illiberal. Therefore, London must scan the far horizons and take a forward-leaning posture, watching, engaging and intervening on the periphery to protect its core.

…It asserts that Africa matters wherever there is extremism or violence, not a very discriminating test; Eastern Europe matters because Britain is engaged there; the Middle East matters because it is central to security and ‘totemic’ to extremists, and Afghanistan-Pakistan for its links to domestic terrorism. Central Asia, Eastern Europe, large chunks of Africa and the Middle East: these four spheres would strain a superpower, let alone Britain. Defined this way, the country’s interests have acquired an open-ended, de-territorialised and unbounded character. If British policymakers and their military advisers believe that the nation’s interests are at stake wherever questions of order, values, stability or wealth are involved, all things are Britain’s concern and virtually everything matters. “

I'm going to leave it there, but if I read another article suggesting that with just a bit more money the military will be fixed I won't be held responsible for the consequences.

What do young people care about?

2012-02-07T19:44:00.002Z

Its hard to imagine that there is anyone who hasnt at least heard of SOPA or its twin PIPA. Shockingly bad pieces of legislation in their own right, they sparked a wave of protest across America (online and offline) which eventually led to a humiliating climb down by those who had initially put the bills forward. Here's a little of the background from Gizmodo:

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a "mark-up period" on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court's permission.

There were other parts to the bill, but thats the core of it, of course the consequences wouldnt have been grave:

"The Act would allow the government to break the Internet addressing system," wrote 108 law professors in a July letter to Congress. "The Internet's Domain Name System ("DNS") is a foundational building block upon which the Internet has been built and on which its continued functioning critically depends. The Act will have potentially catastrophic consequences for the stability and security of the DNS."

Luckily the US has always been opposed to the free internet, its not like the President ever said this in China:

I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” Obama said. “I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.”

The result of this rampant hypocracy? Well... pretty much everyone went a bit crazy, because it turns out that more or less everyone sees a threat to the free Internet as a threat to their personal freedoms, whether or not they exploit the Internet for copyright infringing materials or not. Technology companies spent a lot, but the main body of the pressure came from average people who want a free public Internet.

But here's something which I found really fascinating. Considering the blather about the US election you'd think it would probably come in ahead of a piece of internet legislation but here are some statistics from the Pew Research Centre:

Twenty-three percent of young people, ages 18 to 29, followed the SOPA protests. In contrast, 21 percent followed the 2012 elections, and just 10 percent tracked news about our nation’s economy, reports Pew.

Curiosity about SOPA trickled all the way down to the K–12 set. Students showed interest as educators, including librarians, spoke about the blackouts, copyright and piracy, and the bills themselves—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)—which have since been pulled by Capitol Hill lawmakers.

As ACTA grows ever closer its important that the success seen in the US over SOPA is replicated, to ensure that yet another disastrous set of policies are allowed to become reality.

Wikistrat and fracking

2012-02-06T20:40:00.002Z

As the more eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed I have recently joined Wikistrat's community of analysts. Special thanks go to Mark Safranski of ZenPundit fame and Tom Barnett (who likely needs no introduction to regular readers) who were kind enough to raise this on their respective blogs and (amongst others) have made me very welcome within the community.

The emphasis of what I'll be talking about on there will be energy, technology along with Russia and Central Asia, although I'm thoroughly looking forward to getting involved in the broad ranging discussions which take place on the Wikistrat platform. Currently running is a simulation on the future of fracking, with an emphasis of its likely impact on North America. Described thusly by Dr Barnett:

For now, we tee up the first of about a half-dozen major sims that will explore the drivers of a particular future world order that I became intrigued with as a result of last summer's Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition. To me, how the NorthAm energy boom (question mark suggests nothing in this world is a given) unfolds is one of the major global uncertainties. North America can get it right or wrong on a host of levels, and since we're the inventors of these fracking revolution, the QWERTY effect would be huge, triggering a host of possible future pathways from fabulous to self-desructively nasty in terms of the environment and/or whether or not this great gift becomes an excuse for bad geostrategic choices by the U.S., China, Europe, Brazil, India, Russia - the big six we're focusing on here. You can say, it's a simple projection: it works or it doesn't. But the secondary and tertiary pathways that are revealed in this two stage process (NorthAm leads, others follow or ignore) are varied and immense in their capacity to make global stability better or worse.

Crowd sourcing a discussion around such a complex and difficult set of issues is a thoroughly novel way to do it, with many opportunities to both develop your own thoughts, as well as help others find the strengths and weaknesses in their own work. For those interested in some of the top line findings the Wikistrat Twitter feed is posting at least a couple of thoughts a day.

I look forward to posting more about the community as public pieces of work become avaliable.

Blogging on hold for one week

2012-01-31T21:44:00.001Z

Due to other commitments I'm not going to be able to blog this week. Lots of things to talk about next week when I return however!

Its all getting a bit Newt in here

2012-01-26T13:33:00.002Z

Newt Gingrich is the political equivalent of someone who looks hot when you notice them at the other end of a long corridor, often (as in this case) the closer you get, the worse it becomes. Face to face, its a mess.

Foreign policy is the area which concerns me most as a non-American. US Presidents have the ability to do real harm to their allies in this one area, and although Obama has more or less killed the Special Relationship we remain at least on good speaking terms with the USA, and are likely to remain so. Its rather worrying that the breakthrough candidate, Speaker Gingrich is so... goddamn mental.

The Atlantic did a good writeup of his erratic position on foreign policy the other day:

Gingrich seems to be awash in competing ideas -- his favorite word -- but has little in the way of core beliefs to guide them, or little compunction about jumping from one contradictory declaration to the next. This might make some fun for bloggers and opposition researchers in pointing out Gingrich's contradictions and inconsistencies. But imagine what it would be like for a head of state or senior government official watching Washington from Beijing or Moscow or Jerusalem or Tehran, and having no idea how President Gingrich is going to behave.

Gingrich's approach to problems of any kind seems, as Conor Friedersdorf put it, to start with "fundamentally transforming" the issue or policy or agency at hand. He wants to gut the State Department, shut down Homeland Security to be replaced with a new agency, and bring "profound change" to the Agency for International Development, the military, the war on terror, and diplomacy. His love of dramatic, bold, sweeping policy changes -- apparently made for the sake of being bold and dramatic and sweeping -- makes for great press conferences, but they would create uncertainty about how these newly "transformed" institutions and policies are going to operate.

Of course they're right, its critically important that the cards are largely on the table as far as what the US is likely to do in any given set of circumstances. Iran knows that if they continue to develop their nuclear technology, they will most likely get bombed, that leaves it up to them as to how they then move ahead.

The issue is that Gingrich tends to devolve swiftly into pure fantasy, not least in his 1996 desire to explore how feasible it would be to develop a real world Jurrasic Park:

“Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park?” Gingrich asked on page 190 of the book, adding in parenthesis that such an achievement “may not be at all impossible.”

“Wouldn’t that be one of the spectacular accomplishments of human history?” he continued. “What if we could bring back extinct species?”

Now, I realise this is a speculative throw away line, but it does speak to a rather 'aspirational' aspect of his personality, as well as his limited understanding of technology and how it works. I agree that science fiction has been very good at predicting technological innovation, that doesnt mean that every science fiction idea is reality waiting to happen, it just means that in a vast sample some guys get it right from time to time.

He has also recently decided that there will be an American moon base in place by the end of his second term:

"By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American," he said. According to Talking Points Memo Gingrich went on to say that the base would be used for "science, tourism, and manufacturing" and to create a "robust industry" modelled on the airline business in the 20th century.

His 2012 bit of crazy is about cyberwar. Setting aside the fact that no one is really sure what a cyberwar is (I have my own personal definition, which tends to change from time to time) the rather casual way he throws the term around, and equates it to real world action is a little bit concerning:

“I think that we have to treat state-based covert activities as the equivalent of acts of war,” Gingrich said in response to a question about countries that target U.S. corporate and government information systems. “And I think that we have to respond to that and create a level of pain which teaches people not to do it.”

Really? Because "state based covert activities" covers a hell of a lot of ground. Its been the bread and butter of Governments to spy on each other for as long as there have been Governments, and usually no one goes to war over it. Otherwise we'd all be at war with each other all the time.

Putting this in the context of cyber espionage is even more dangerous. Its so easy to hide your tracks online. Complete anonimity might not be possible, but its damn close. Certainly as you fuel up the bombers I think you want to have a better idea who conducted the attack than "well the IP address is probably somewhere in China".

Also, how to do you tell the difference between a state sponsored act of cyber espionage and a private citizen doing it for the lulz or at the behest of a company? Corporate espionage online is a fact of life now, and will be forever. Companies are finally figuring this out and starting to build decent network security, but in the end, if someone wants in, they will get it.

My concern is that he is trying to win a war of words which no one else is playing it, one upping his own statements in terms of how high he can crank up the rhetoric.

There are two options as far as I can see

He believes what he is saying - This means he is a dangerously uninformed individual, who, with access to the vast power of the presidency will be a threat to world peace and security
He just likes the sound of his own voice - I really hope this is the case, as he would hardly be the first person to throw about phrases like 'cyber war' without really knowing what it means

Frankly, I'm worried he might be a little mad.

Rethinking Strategy

2012-01-26T08:24:00.002Z

I'm a big fan of any discussion about Grand Strategy, it's something most countries lack, but which many need. Most countries have strategies, but no over arching objective to tie them together, certainly not in the foreign policy field. This leads to reactive, knee jerk decision making on a case by case basis. Not only does this make it harder for us (as a nation) to make decisions, it also makes it harder for other countries to understand our motivations for taking action, since our actions on day 1 may be driven by different objectives than our actions on day 2.

Rethinking security have this post on Grand Strategy arguing that:

...there is a very (conceptually) simple way for the United states to rectify its grand strategy problems: decide what is essential for American security and prosperity. Or to be more colloquial, what can Americans not go without, what are the biggest threats to nation, and how does force and diplomacy figure into these things? For example, we have determined that the free flow of Gulf oil into the world market is a critical American national interest (and we’re not alone, it’s also a critical Chinese national interest too) and allocated the necessary amount of military resources to ensure that Iran is deterred from doing anything more than making blustering non-threats to close the Hormuz Strait.
And this, I suspect, this is also why we recursively turn to wishing for a technocratic grand strategy to rescue us: we simply cannot come to an honest accounting of what essential interests constitute. Sure, part of this is intrinsic to the poisoned chalice of contemporary American politics. Americans have deep domestic divisions about foreign policy and security. There is a wide gulf between the basic epistemological lens that different political parties use when thinking about the basic parameters of foreign policy, to say nothing of the internal disputes within those parties themselves.

Of course these rules apply for the creation of any strategy, for any organisation, campaign etc. It's about finding the one overarching 'essential interest' and placing that at the core of your operations day to day.

Looking at the Republican race for the presidential nomination its possible to see a lack of a Grand Strategy there. At this stage both Gingrich and Romney are operating in reaction to the other, which leads to endless feedback. If one was able to incorporate a real strategy then they would be in a good position to move past their opponent. After all the 'essential interest' here is not to beat your opponent, its to convince the largest number of people that you're the right man to be president. Arguing with your opponent doesn't achieve that, so it shouldn't be a core piece of the on the ground activities, but there you go.

Anyway, the main article is well worth a read, so go forth and read.

The Marine Corps travel guide

2012-01-23T18:54:00.002Z

The Marine Corps has not been doing well in the last couple of weeks, most notably due to the video of Marines urinating on the bodies of some deceased Afghan men. The impact of this has been largely predictable as @Starbuck_WOI (aka Crispin Burke) notes "This is why you don't pee on the enemy":

An Afghan soldier who shot dead four French troops has said he did it because of a recent video showing U.S. Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban insurgents, security sources told AFP.

"During the initial interrogations by French soldiers, he told them he did it because of the video in which American soldiers were urinating on bodies," an Afghan army officer said.

The issue has been discussed well on Kings of War, and it's worth noting a few key paragraphs:

The thing is, though, these scenes are really only partly outrageous if you accept the definition above. To be sure, they are violent. And they go beyond standards of what is right and decent not to mention standards of discipline in the Marine Corps. But they’re really not unusual. It’s only unusual that such things now propagate outside of the theatre of conflict so widely and rapidly. Dreadful things have always happened in war.
...
Cameras are ubiquitous in daily life and on the battlefield. A while ago I wrote in an article ‘The More You Know the Less You Understand‘ that ‘networked soldiery which can film anything and store and share the images on a microchip changes the rules of the game.’ I’m now not quite as sure of that statement–I’m not sure, as I was implying then, that it really is a strategic game changer. Now, I think perhaps that while the style of play is different it’s still the same old game.
...
I’m not really trying to defend what these Marines were up to. Only to suggest that the dense media ecology in which war is now fought has an Alice in Wonderland like dimension which obscures as much as it illuminates while boosting war’s inherent chanciness, non-linearity and tendency to unintended consequences. As Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins put it in War and Media:
…instant recording, archiving and distribution of images and stories add a chaotic element to any action. Nobody knows who will see an event, where and when they will see it or how they will interpret it. Nobody knows how the reactions of people locally or around the world will feed back into the event, setting off a chain of other events, anywhere, in which anybody may get caught up.

I too am not going to claim what these men did was right, it isn't, simply put. The reasons they did what they did will no doubt come out in time when these men rightly are judged by the rules of the Marine Corps.

The point of this post is not to rehash what has already been rehashed in enormous detail, but instead to direct people to a document which I was pointed to (I'm sorry to say I forget by whom), the Marine Corps orientation document for those deploying into Afghanistan. It's important for what it represents, a deeply thoughtful and sensitive culture within the Marine Corps, designed expressly to ensure that incidents such as the one above do not occur.

It opens with a telling paragraph:

This guidebook was designed specifically to provide basic cultural information for Marines deploying to Afghanistan. In such a short guide, it is sometimes necessary to simplify complex concepts, or to make generalizations about behavior, or to reduce complicated historical events to a few sentences. This guide is intended only as an introduction to the subject for Marines deploying to Afghanistan. It provides a basic understanding of a rich culture, a dynamic and living history, and a complicated insurgency. At the end of this guide, therefore, the Marine will find suggestions for further reading to dig deeper into the history, culture, and language of Afghanistan.

The reading list at the end is well worth checking as an aside, comprehensive if a little short, it's added a few entries to my own Amazon wishlist. As someone commented on a Facebook discussion I had about the document:

Wow... This is definitely a spot-on guide. It took me a couple months of living in Kabul just to get the basic details that are covered in the first few dozen pages. Knowing how the different ethnic groups inter-relate before heading out could have saved me a couple headaches.

The most interesting part is without doubt the section on ethnic groups, which details geography, demography, customs, culture and other details down to types of headress and clothing. There are also some slightly amusing asides including:

Homosexual activity is taboo in Afghanistan, and officially can result in a death sentence, but it is far more common than most sources and most Afghans will admit.
...
Afghan men often take younger men as lovers. Many US soldiers have heard an Afghan say "women are for babies, but men are for love,"

Another:

The combination of loose, baggy, comfortable trousers and long knee-length shirt is called the Shalwar Kameez and is worn by virtually all Afghan males. The sleeveless vest is also customary. The pen in the vest pocket of the man in the foreground (Pacha Khan Zadran) is a symbol of literacy.

Its easy to laugh at things like this, and they are of course culturally relative, but for a document like this it is superbly detailed.

More important are passages like this:

...blood feuds arising from real or perceived dishonor can and often do last for generations. When American soldiers or Marines search a man's home, he is obligated to take revenge for this dishonor against an American (all Americans are seen as belonging to the same clan.) This revenge may be taken by planting an IED, for example, or by sniping at and killing an American. There is no statute of limitations in Pashtunwali, and no sense that "time heals all wounds." One famous Pashtun proverb holds that "I took my revenge after 100 years, and I only regret that I acted in haste."

This passage is an open entreaty to Marines to resist the desire to harm an Afghan in body or in property, not the sort of thing the general public might expect to be in a military manual, yet here it is, clear as day.

I'm not going to go into any more detail on the document, apart from to say it is one of the most revealing looks at how a modern military can prepare its soldiers for a hostile environment in a positive and proactive way.

Kudos to the writers of the document, and the men who stick by it day after day.

True opposition research

2012-01-18T21:09:00.002Z

Its rare an opportunity comes along to really examine something from the back room of a campaign, without someone having altered it in some fashion. Usually it comes in a book, or a magazine article, in which someone refers to something that happened. So its a delight when something like this emerges, John McCain's opposition research file on Mitt Romney, not just an extract, the whole darn thing.

I'm not going to claim to have read every page of this, I've only read the extract, but its grim reading, hundreds of statements, every contradiction, every waver is charted in exacting detail, with dates, times and supporting quotes to go with it. The fact this is in the public domain now will only aid the anti Mitt brigade in the media (I include the blogosphere heavily in this). Also, any gaps in the research being done by those opposiung Romney will be swiftly plugged by access to this document.

It's proof, if any were needed of the sheer amount of information which is out there about public figures. Everything that Mitt Romney has ever said while in any meaningful office has been dug out and put into this document. Its almost sinister, although there's a certain amount of satisfaction to be had reading this document. It makes it very very clear that there is pretty much zero chance of Romney winning against Obama. There's pretty much no area he isn't weak in, and what he'll have to say (and has already said) to get the nomination will ensure that he's unable to win in a general election.

If you've got any interest in political campaigning, this is an invaluable document and a piece of modern history.

Book Review: Currency Wars

2012-01-16T21:46:00.004Z

I've been recommending this all over the place of late so I thought it was about time that I wrote a book review of Currency Wars by James Rickards. Being as it is probably one of the better books I've read on finance recently its certainly earned its high spot on my (Kindle) shelf.

Currency Wars is two things, first it is an intelligent discussion of the world we find outselves in and the likely outcomes of the ongoing competition between states and the hyper-rich organisations which are now able to operate at a nation state level when it comes to finance. It also acts as a superb historical resource, charting how modern currency emerged as what we all recognise in the 21st century. Suffice it to say that this was a messy process.

The book starts off with one of my favourite topics, war games. As it transpires the US military ran a war game(s), involving Rickards in which they tried to assess whether currency could be used as a tool of inter state conflict. The short answer is that yes it can, but its very hard to predict how it could be used safely. Any sufficiently powerful state or group of states (Read, China, Russia, EU, America, possibly a few of the BRIC countries operating together) can kick off some pretty messy business to their own short term benefit, however controlling the consequences would be nigh on impossible.

The other factor which has only emerged in relatively recent history, which further complicates this world, is the previously mentioned hyper rich non state entities. The role Rickards paints for them is largely to add randomness to the whole situation (I paraphrase), in that it is hard to see which way they will jump in any particular circumstance, as they do not have the same loyalties or institutional memories that a state like Russia or China might have.

I'll set aside an analysis of the history section of the book as ultimately, that's too complicated to easily summarise in a single blog post. Suffice it to say it is an eloquent and cogent analysis of how the world we have now has emerged, it also sets the scene for what is to come very well.

Rickards posits a group of scenarios which he believes to be the most likely in the next few years, they make for grim reading. One of the scenarios is entitled "Chaos" and in essence suggests that we could end up in an endlessly downward spiral, with no end in sight, as critical infrastructure deteriorates to the extent it can never be regenerated. Where that spiral ends up, who knows, but I certainly want to buy a lot of canned goods after reading it.

There are of course more positive scenarios however they all rely on at least the majority of actors having a large degree of courage and the ability to lead the world out of crisis. As I was reading it I have to admit, for a short moment, I miss Gordon Brown. Say what you like about him, at a critical moment he was willing to lock a group of world leaders in a room and deny them an exit until they agreed to drag the world out of the fire in 2008. He didn't finish the job by any means, but at least he was able to achieve something. The current Conservative Government is extremely beholden to the City and will not take a leadership position on any issue which might threaten those institutions

We also cannot depend on China to help rescue us and I believe, as does Rickards clearly, that China has its own domestic concerns which will limit its ability to affect change on the world stage. China is a relatively new actor at this level and has demonstrated its primary goal is to protect its own finances and currency.

America is in rapid and probably unstoppable decline, a readjustment at least two decades in the making is occuring there. Europe has been revealed to have huge systemic flaws in the institutions of the Euro which do not look solvable in the short term. Russia is mired in an increasingly autocratic system, and its economy is supported largely by the export of energy resources, not wildly helpful when diversity is needed.

Add to that the fact that countries natural position when it comes to economies and currencies is conflict. That is what they are geared up for and the way they will continue to operate naturally. Operating in another way will require powerful leadership and the ability to make rational strategic choices, the impact of which will last over the next decade or more, a timeline which few democratically elected politicians are willing to consider any more.

Who knows how it will all turn out, but in the interim, read this excellent book and find out just how bad it could get. Or check out this bit of the Financial Times which is dedicated entirely to currency wars, in case you thought this was a nice bit of theory.

Insight into Anonymous

2012-01-12T20:52:00.002Z

Wired has done another of their great pieces on Anonymous, entitled 2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread. Charting the antics of Anonymous in 2011, it's rather an eye opener even for me quite how much happened in the Anon community in the last 12 months.

It really has been the coming of age year in many ways for Anons, as the Legion moves from Lulz to epic Lulz which have annoyed Governments, rather than individuals and Scientologists.

Anyway, not much else to say this evening but that you should take a read of this important piece.

Italy and its largest corporation

2012-01-11T12:53:00.003Z

This article captured my imagination today and as it's my 200th post I thought I'd write about something I really enjoy discussing, criminals. In essence a report has emerged which suggests that the Mafia is now Italy's largest business:

The country's four Mafia groups have broken out of their traditional strongholds in the dusty 'Mezzogiorno' south of Rome and spread their tentacles across the whole country, taking advantage of the economic crisis to snap up ailing businesses and ramp up their loan-shark operations.

They now boast estimated cash reserves of €65bn, collectively making them "Italy's biggest bank", according to a study released on Tuesday by Confesercenti, a prominent employers' association.

They groups make an estimated annual profit of €100bn – about 7pc of Italy's GDP.

Their sources of income are pretty diverse, but ultimately fall back on the old classics:

With the economic crisis meaning banks are loath to lend, Mafia dons have profited as desperate businesses are forced to turn to loan sharks demanding crippling rates of interest.

Organised crime groups - including Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra around Naples and the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, have bought ailing businesses, shops and restaurants.

The exorbitant rates they charge for loaning money have pushed many enterprises to the wall.
Mafia chiefs have also moved into new areas of business such as public health, transport and logistics.
Gambling is particularly lucrative. The average adult Italian spends nearly €1,300 a year on slot machines, bingo and other forms of gambling. This €76bn market is Italy's third biggest industry, according to a report presented in Rome on Monday by Libera, an anti-mafia association.

The grip of the Camorra on toxic waste management has been hugely detrimental to the environment in parts of southern Italy and has caused a rubbish crisis in Naples for years.

Now much of this is nothing new, it is only the scale which has changed, with the Mafia increasingly able to penetrate areas of society which were closed to it previously, or at least were not as porous as they were now.

On its own this topic is just of interest, but it sounded suspiciously like another country which has a rife and diverse group of criminals who are seeking to further their own power at the detriment of the state, Mexico.

Italy has long seen its civil institutions decline in the face of its Executive (Berlusconi), and is now in the throes of a major financial crisis which means that cuts are the only answer the world economy will accept. This will mean still weaker state institutions and a population searching for money through avenues outside of state control, and into the breach steps the Mafia.

The Mafia are subverting traditional state roles in Italy, as well as dominating the commercial space through their control (direct or indirect) of certain sections of the economy. Waste management may not be glamorous, but you notice its absence pretty quickly. I think the idea that the Mafia are crushing businesses out of existence is likely hyperbole to some extent, or at least an activity which will die out over time. In the end, destroying a major revenue stream is not in their long term interests.

The truly interesting part will occur if the Mafia start to replace fundamental social functions, as they have in South America and parts of Africa. Hospitals and schools are the obvious areas which could be replaced in time. Whether this occurs will be up to the Italian state, but of course, with brutal spending cuts to come, it is increasingly likely that people will turn a blind eye to exactly where the money is coming from.

The Italian state, in its current position, is clearly not able, or not willing, to deal with the Mafia on a criminal level, else it would not have allowed such a direct challenger to have emerged in the first place. It will be a long time before we know if this lack of action is the result of simple malaise, or something more insidious. Regardless, the criminal element will seek to subvert political figures, if not now, then soon, because it is in their interest to control those social institutions which could limit their power.

This means that it is only a matter of time before the police are penetrated and subverted. With budgets about to be slashed that means that pay will likely decline, or promotion opportunities will dry up. From there is is a rather more simple matter to find the weak links and ensure that these individuals are given money and other incentives to ensure their co-operation. That becomes self re-enforcing, as corrupted individuals support each other up the ranks, and although it may take years (Mexico suggests not that many years) eventually the police will become a meaningless institution when it comes to projecting state power against the Mafia.

Now that doesnt mean that Italy will be left with the military as its own tool to fight back against the Mafia. It will take many years before the undermining of Italy's institutions by the criminal element are enough of a problem that such strong action needs to be taken. Most likely it will be when the various families start to compete with each other and that competition spills out onto the streets in the form of violence that there will be real moves made to roll back the spread.

Conflict between the main groups is less likely than in Mexico. There are mechanisms in place to deal with conflict, at least initially. But as in Mexico, the larger the organisations grow the more chance there is of elements of their hierarchy splitting off and going their own way. When that happens violence is likely to swiftly follow. Like the Zetas these new organisations will have little institutional memory of "how things used to be" and will be willing to resort to more violent and extreme means to maintain control.

The Mafia is unlikely to remain confined to Italy forever. Although to its North and West Italy is bordered by relatively strong states, to its East and South this is less true. Of course having an area of Europe with significantly weakened institutions and a powerful criminal element will mean that criminal enterprises across Europe will have somewhere to turn.

This is just a thought experiment of course, but if the Mafia is as strong as this report suggests it has the potential to use its current revenue to springboard itself still further as the Italian state retreats in the face of austerity measures. What that will mean a decade or more down the line is impossible to predict, but as states grow weaker, seeing criminal organisations on the rise is a worrying precedent.

And so ends my 200th post. Thanks to everyone who has encouraged me to get this far.

Death of electronic privacy

2012-01-10T07:27:00.003Z

Hat tip to @nigroeneveld for these two articles which, taken together, I think point the direction America and the US will increasingly go when it comes to electronic data seizure. The first is about the increasing use of seizures at airports of laptops and data storage devices:

And nab gadgets they most certainly do. Johnston writes that last year alone, 5,000 devices were seized:

The Customs and Border Protection agency says the power to seize laptops is necessary to find information about terrorists, drug smugglers, and other criminals trying to enter the country. Of the more than 340 million people who traveled across the US border in 2011, about 5,000 had laptops, cellphones, iPods, or cameras searched.

The other is about an ongoing court case, trying to determine if you can be forced to give up your passwords for your devices in order to get around encryption:

In Colorado, a District Court judge is deliberating on whether Ramona Fricosu, accused of committing financial fraud, has to disclose her laptop password to decrypt the stored content.
Marcia Hoffman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is counsel for the defendant. She alleges that Fricosu should not be compelled to give up her password for two main reasons:

The government haven't specifically identified what they are looking for on the laptop. This makes it seem somewhat of an evidence-fishing trip.
Requiring disclosure of the password would breach her US Constitutional Fifth Amendment right against forced self-incrimination. There hasn't been any immunity offered for loss of this protection.

Differences in legal structures (Constitutional vs non-Constitutional) the desires of law enforcement agencies remain the same. Strong encryption grows easier and easier to impliment and it's now more or less at the stage that commercially (or even free) encryption is impossible to break using brute force means (unless you're happy to still be working on it when the Sun turns into a lump of coal the size of a fist). So the law will have to turn to compelling people to give up passwords or face a lengthy prison sentence and/or fines.

The problem for law enforcement is that this problem has already been fixed, some suggestions from the first of the two articles:

Resisting the government isn't a viable approach to protecting your data in these legal seizures. Johnston lists a few approaches that businesses are taking to keep trade secrets from such seizures:

Wipe laptops clean before you travel.
Move sensitive information to the cloud and retrieve it later.
Move information to a flash drive or external hard drive.

To which I would add three additional recommendations:

Encrypt whatever device to which you transfer sensitive information. All you have to do is poke through the lost & found at a transit station to realize that USB drives, at least, fall from our pockets like leaves from autumn trees.
If you travel frequently, consider buying a second laptop to bring in order to leave your personal computer at home.

These measures are all pretty reasonable, and very easy to implement. Cloud data storage would be my preferred means for a lot of stuff, but of course, there's always the chance that too could be pulled if someone had access to your laptop for an indefinite period of time and had your passwords.

So what do you? I'd recommend if you have to travel with data on your laptop you think about using TrueCrypt. Not only does it allow you to create an encrypted partition, it allows you to create a hidden partition within that which is also encrypted. So if you ever have to give up your passwords, you'll only be letting someone access your "safe" partition. From the outside, your average law enforcement guy is going to really struggle to prove there is a hidden partition.

I know it can sound paranoid to talk in these terms, but good data security can't be beaten. How many times could embarrassment have been avoided if Government laptops had decent security on them? Indeed, I've lost count of the number of times I've received emails at work along the lines of "A person who will remain nameless lost a laptop, so we're instituting a password system that means all passwords must be 85 characters long using a mix of languages, including one we made up just for passwords". My current password is absurd, in an attempt to comply with draconian rules.

And frankly, it should be difficult for law enforcement or anyone else to go rummaging around in your laptop or personal data. People's lives are so entangled now with electronic devices that pictures of the kids often sit next to confidential work emails, and no one has should have the "right" to take away your right to keep what's private private, unless they already have clear evidence of your criminality.

Or just don't travel.

A thought experiment on war

2012-01-05T21:12:00.002Z

Kenneth Payne over at Kings of War has started a blogpost entitled What is Conventional Warfare? From Mr Payne:

Surprisingly tough question, posed by a friend hard at work on her research proposal. I thought I’d crowd source an answer from learned readers here. But first, here’s what I suggested:

Conventional warfare isn’t just about capabilities employed – that is, industrially manufactured, technologically advanced equipment, deployed by recognisably military organisations. Rather it is a society’s way of fighting that encompasses the doctrinal thinking, the organisational structures, the rules of engagement, and even the appropriate goals of violence. What makes it ‘conventional’ is just that it adheres to the dominant conventions of the time.

Of course, all this changes through time as the societies and conventions involved in generating ‘conventional’ approaches to war evolve. Thus, the conventional forces of Napoleon look radically different from the ‘conventional’ forces of France today.

Such an evolution in conventional war might include changes in permissible conduct – For example – why were chemical weapons seen as conventional in the context of WW1, but not now? Why could you flatten Dresden in 1945, but not now?

They might also involve changes in force structure – Why use conscripts as part of a conventional military in Vietnam, but not now? What about the use of private contractors? Is outsourcing violence like that ‘conventional’, or does it profoundly change the relationship between the state/society and those who enact its violence?

And it might also involve changes in concepts, as for example on attritional force v manoeuvre, where the ‘conventional’ approach of British strategic thought (and American, from the early 1980s onwards, if not before) was to substitute manoeuvre and shock action for firepower.

I think my favourite answer so far has come from Callum Lane:

The cynic in me says that conventional wars are those that militaries want to fight, and unconventional are those they do not want to fight.

A rather astute observation I would say.

I've been getting involved in the debate over there and am currently trying to figure out where I think the idea of cyber war fits into the framework of conventional/unconventional warfare, and being challenged as to whether cyber war is even a real thing.

Well worth taking a look.

#Riots, incoming

2012-01-04T22:29:00.002Z

There's a rather superb piece in Wired entitled "#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You". It charts how our increasingly sophisticated technology has reached a point at which is has become a tool for violent mass action of a variety of types:

...on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a rash of more mysterious, more malicious-seeming crowds in which technology appeared to play a central role. Riots over four days in Britain spread across the country and caused millions of dollars in property damage. US cities struggled with their own disorder: In Kansas City, Missouri, gunfire injured three after hundreds of high school students descended on an open-air shopping mall, while Philadelphia imposed a curfew to fight a long string of surprise gatherings by teens. At least five cities saw an innovative form of robbery, where a large group of kids would simultaneously run into a store, take items off the shelves, and run out again. To be sure, technology wasn’t at the root of all the crowd mayhem: For example, an investigation of a group robbery in Germantown, Maryland, determined that the thieves had hatched their plan on a bus, not online. But with most of these events, there was some sort of electronic trail (Facebook, Twitter, texts, BBM) that showed how they coalesced.
Groping for what to call these events, the media christened them “flash mobs”—lumped them in, that is, with the fad in which large crowds carry out a public performance and then post the results on YouTube. So at around the same time that Fox was running a lighthearted flash-mob reality show called Mobbed, and Friends With Benefits, the high-grossing rom-com starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, featured a flash-mob dance in Times Square, pundits and public officials suddenly began railing against flash mobs as a threat to public order. The convenience store knock-overs became “flash mob robberies,” or even “flash robs.” “The evolution of flash mobs from pranks to crime and revolution,” declared one of my local papers, the San Francisco Examiner, after the hacktivist group Anonymous had helped to create subway shutdowns.

The London riots are of course a perfect example of where several "flash riots" started to co-operate across the capital, and formed a self organising and self perpetuating cycle, one only broken by the pouring in of truly prodigious numbers of police. So what causes this?

Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.

It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.
The second factor in crowd violence, in Stott’s view, is simply what he calls power: the perception within a crowd that it has the ability to do what it wants, to take to the streets without fear of punishment. This, in turn, is largely a function of sheer size—and just as with legitimacy, small gradations can make an enormous difference. We often think about flash mobs and other Internet-gathered crowds as just another type of viral phenomenon, the equivalent of a video that gets a million views instead of a thousand. But in the physical world, the distance separating the typical from the transformational is radically smaller than in the realm of bits. Merely doubling the expected size of a crowd can create a truly combustible situation.

I'm not going to post any more of the piece, as its necessary to read the whole thing. It touches on what I believe will be one of the defining conflicts of this decade, that of centralised Governments fighting against their decentralised citizenry.

A critical element of Bewegungskrieg, manoeuvre warfare, is the ability to dispel as much of the fog of war as possible, in order to create an environment in which you are able to 'see' more than your opponent. With that ability you can pick the points you want to fight at, choosing the ground, and pulling his forces apart piece by piece. Boyd's idea of tempo is critical to this, shifting your own activities to a higher pace in order to operate within the OODA loop of your opponent.

Is there any purer expression of this concept than a networked leadership free group of rioters? They pour into an area, control it, draw in police, disperse, having achieved their 'goals' (occupy, loot, escape), almost always wholly intact, and reform elsewhere. In doing so they exhaust police resources, money and manpower, and every victory will draw in more supporters.

Their lines of communication were impossible to disrupt, sometimes encrypted and often hosted overseas, Twitter, Facebook, BBM. They provided a highly accurate overview of the battlespace, in real time, to all participants. The data was a flow, allowing participants to take what they needed, without drowning them in excess data. It was elegant, beautiful, and terrifying.

Project forward and I think we will see the end of fixed position protest as the primary tool particularly of youth protest. Instead we will see 'raid' style protests, with groups meeting, motivating themselves through numbers, then breaking up to cause disruption and get attention for their cause.

I also think we will see more riots, and those riots will grow harder and harder to put down. For the time being, no one on the rioting side is trying to target the police, but there is every chance that will change if there is some precipitating incident. It is simply a matter of confidence, once the mob believes it can attack the police without fear of reprisal, it will. Simple as that.

To deal with that the police will grow more militarised, using what looks more and more like army equipment in order to put down riots and protests, for fear that they will grow and spread out of control. However, they will always be a step behind, using a rigid command structure, having to operate (broadly) within the law, and constantly disrupted by an opponent who can move faster than they can.

Its important to ask, what if there had been a few thousand more rioters? What if they had had a little more confidence in their cause, and faced down police? Or simply kept operating within the OODA loop of the police no matter how many of them there were? It's not hard to imagine this would be possible. The only way of stopping it at that point is to up the ante... and then it looks a bit like this:

There is a coming rule set change when it comes to protest and civil disruption. Occupy has created one model for a fixed protest which can retain elements of manoeuvre, the London riots provided another for full blown civil conflict. If, and I believe this will happen, with the Euro about to fall and recession looming, there are 21st century riots akin to the Poll Tax riots, they will be supported by a resilient and networked communications structure. There will be fewer and fewer confrontations with the police on their own terms.

The civil conflicts and protests of the future will bear little resemblance to the past. Militarised police vs networked smart mobs, that's the future.

The future of jobs

2012-01-03T22:57:00.001Z

I'm purposefully avoiding a "thoughts about 2012 post", not because I don't like them, but because I can't think of anything to say which hasn't already been said elsewhere. What I do hope we can look forward in the future is the growing understanding that world we live in cannot be understood by the rules of the world from which we have come.

One area where I think we need to really re-evaluate how we understand things is when it comes to jobs. Before his flame out from the Presidential campaign (surprisingly due to having an affair, rather than being too stupid to have an opinion on Libya) he had these pearls of wisdom to share about the world of work:

Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!

Now, I know what he was trying to say, but frankly, he's an idiot. Everyone, no matter how limited their understanding of the world, thinks everyone can be rich. Even in the best economic times there will always be the rich and the poor, if only because the definitions of those terms will change to reflect the new reality.

However, on a more fundamental level, how much longer can we go on pretending that there will always be enough jobs for everyone. Amazon has around 33,700 and a revenue of $43.59bn according to the most recent figures I could track down. Of course it also creates thousands of jobs by providing a service through which third parties can retail their products, in a way which would have been impossible without Amazon. However, there is no way of cutting it to suggest that Amazon is, or ever will, create the vast numbers of jobs a company this successful would have done 50 years ago.

The norm, increasingly, is that companies are going to drive towards more knowledge based systems. This is true even of manufacturing, where robotics will continue to improve until humans are essentially unnecessary, apart from in the event of some catastrophic failure, although possibly not even then. Even my job, a market research position, will one day be a job I share with sophisticated AI programs, who will do the lions share of the boring things, while I (hopefully) am retained to do the "story" part of the job.

With that in mind, it will eventually become the case that there is simply no way of pretending any more that there are going to be enough jobs for everyone. What will society look like when politicians have to face up the reality that there is one less job than the total number of people, let along a deficit of a few million jobs? That's the world we're heading for, without a shadow of a doubt, and there is nothing that can change that.

The present day welfare state is nothing compared to what is to come. When hundreds of thousands of people will live their entire lives without any real chance of employment for the majority of that time the state will have to radically reform its role.

My prediction, corporation tax will go up, and income tax will go way down. The state will need to provide the benefits required to prevent civil unrest, and the money won't be coming from the legions of the unemployed, and the state will have a vested interest in making sure that those who do have jobs are spending as possible supporting the high revenue, low employing, companies which support the economy.

However, there will also be much larger numbers of people creating small companies, which will exist at the periphery of the larger entities, much as Amazon works with third party retailers today. This will provide many people a small income, which will help ensure the state isnt completely crushed by the weight of organising the welfare for its citizens.

Anyway, that's my predication for the day, but the most important part of this is that we need to start moving away faster than we are from the assumptions which governed the world as it existed previously. The emphasis of Government cannot be to recreate the world of yesterday, but it must instead work to build the world as it will exist and create institutions which are resilient enough to survive change.

Book Review: Inside Scientology

2011-12-05T21:29:00.003Z

I've had a long standing fascination with Scientology. I remember being approached when I was about 14 and asked if I wanted a "stress test" on the high street of my home town. In London I worked just around the corner from the Tottenham Court Road Church of Scientology and would regularly see their members leafleting in the local area. I can't say my impression of them is particularly favourable, and nothing I've read has ever suggested they are anything other than what they seem to be, a pyramid scheme designed to exploit their membership.

There are of course plenty of books on Scientology, however, the majority of them are survivors accounts, and are thus subject to the sort of biases you might well expect of people who have been stripped of their money and dignity by people they once respected. Janet Reitman's book is a true history of the organisation however, and a very important and honest one. Comprising of interviews both of current and former members it tries to tease out the details of the organisation.

The first half is a biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Clearly a deeply flawed and troubled individual, he spent much of his life lying to those around him and using his considerable charm to live beyond his means. Clearly highly intelligent and manipulative he was able to chart a strange life course through which intersected with the lives of the rich and the famous. After his first abortive run at creating a cult like entity through Dianetics he learned his lessons and went on to create the Church of Scientology.

The second half is a look at the modern institution and how it functions. It paints a picture of an organisation in rapid decline, which is at the same time finding new ways to make money. More a corporation than a faith (at least to its leadership), it has done well taking money from the faithful and investing it in property and other assets from which to make yet more money.

There is a touching poignancy to the book, since many of the people being interviewed clearly do have faith, and who are we to argue with that? Sadly their faith protects an organisation which has killed, either maliciously or due to the bizarre practices they maintain.

This book is an important history of events which need to be examined in greater detail. It goes where law enforcement and law makers are clearly too afraid to go and asks questions which often have difficult answers. I highly recommend it.

Science fiction and the future

2011-12-01T22:07:00.002Z

The Guardian has a good post up entitled "Can science fiction lead us away from economic collapse?", the premise being that science fiction is a good judge of whats to come, and thus, perhaps, a map to get past whats happening now, what a friend of mine today described as the "econopocalypse". Here's an extract:

It's a truism that science fiction, however distinct its vision of the future, is always just as much a reflection of its present. The golden age of SF writers, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, predicted near futures of a colonised solar system and an era of engineering marvels from robotics to space elevators. But, viewed through a historical lens, their futures say far more about the cold war politics of 1950s America than the post-industrial world of 2011. If science fiction provides a record of the hopes and fears of each generation for the future ahead, what do contemporary SFwriters say about today?

Seed, by debut novelist Rob Ziegler, extrapolates a future rooted in the economic and environmental concerns of the early 21st century. In common with novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, it explores one of the main preoccupations of science fiction in recent years, the collapse of western-style capitalism. Hardwired into Ziegler's post-apocalyptic vision of a US ravaged by famine and warfare, is an exploration of the extreme material scarcity that the collapse will create for generations to come.

But of course there's a flaw to the article's premise, science fiction doesn't predict the future or try to, it imprints the hopes and fears of the present onto the theories of tomorrow.

So I took to thinking about the science fiction of 2011 and what it might say to us right now about the hopes and fears we have today, in the context of my interests and here are some themes I've noticed in my reading:

We're going to have a lot less wars: This sounds good, but it comes with a caveat, although we'll have less wars there will be just as much conflict. The Windup Girl is a good example of this. The world might be peaceful, but states and corporations continue to work using proxies and agents to wage quiet conflicts with each other, stealing information, killing operatives and generally messing things up. The potential for violence, and the complexity of its implementation are explored in books like Ender's Game.

Robots are going to be a big deal: Albeit not in the way Isaac Asimov thought when he was coming up with the three laws of robotics. For all that its a terrible movie Real Steel gives us a good idea of where the world might be going, robots for entertainment, heavy lifting, and presumably warfare, controlled by human operatives. The idea of independent robotic creatures is receding as a concept, and in my opinion is less evident in modern science fiction than it has been historically. Where it does exist it does so in the form of a singularity type event, as in Robopocalypse, with a rogue AI taking control of most modern technology and going to town on squishy human beings. Its worth noting two things about this theory, first, its a very old idea, second, this is a zombie concept with metal rather than rotting flesh.

We're still all pretty worried about our future dystopia: The fact that Brave New World and 1984 never seem to leave the bestseller lists speaks to the fact that the concept of a new world order has remained part of our consciousness. Even Fahrenheit 451 has been released on Kindle due to the demands of the purchasing public, over the author's original objections.

Population collapse is just around the corner: Whether its zombie books like Zone One, or The End Specialist we are clearly concerned about the population, but not just from the overpopulation sense, but rather the collapse and "reset" of that population. We all recognise increasingly that the world is getting older and at some point, we're going to start running out of people.

We're also running out of future: Science fiction of the 1950's dealt with the future 50 or more years into the future. Increasingly modern science fiction deals with a decade from now. In part this is the result of the rapid pace of technology outstripping even an imaginative writer's ability to keep up. But this runs deeper, it means that disaster is closer than even, a paradigm shift or singularity which will shake the foundations of civilisation as we know it.

This is just a very quick overview of some thoughts I've had while musing on this topic late in the evening. There's a lot more ground to cover here. Science fiction is by far and away the most important medium of fiction in my opinion. No where else is the idea of humanity and its meaning explored in greater detail in nuance than this type of writing. Of course it is in regular fiction or fantasy, but neither of those genres seek to explore the context of humanity in a world which is rapidly changing and evolving.

One only has to watch an episode of Fringe to get the sense that whilst our technology leaps ahead, our morality is still in its infancy. While we step closer to reinventing our species our leaders argue about abortion and birth control, while corporations reach for space we bicker about meaningless trivia.

Science fiction is the hopes and fears of today and tomorrow, explored through the lens of where we see ourselves tomorrow. We should all read more of it.

Building a real cyber security policy

2011-11-25T13:10:00.002Z

So, after all the build up the Government has finally released its Cyber Security Strategy, and what an exciting bit of work it is. It is intended to, in the words of the press release:

[Set] out how the UK will support economic prosperity, protect national security and safeguard the public’s way of life by building a more trusted and resilient digital environment.

All very laudable goals of course, so how will that be done?

Borrowed from The Guardian's writeup, here are some of the top lines:

GCHQ is to get a huge increase in funding, and the Ministry of Defence will benefit too. The ideas in the strategy include:
Creating within two years a cyber crime unit within the National Crime Agency that will take the lead in the most serious fraud and theft cases.
Sending guidelines to courts and police highlighting the extra powers now available to them. They include using orders which ban criminals from owning more than one mobile phone, limiting them to one email address and restricting internet access. Courts can also order people to stop using instant messaging.
Encouraging all police forces to recruit more so-called cyber specials – part-time officers who are experts in computing.
Creating a cyber defence operations group at the MoD, which will be overseen by Air Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, head of the new Joint Forces Command. His job will be to develop "new tactics, techniques and military cyber capabilities". This will include offensive as well as defensive capabilities.
The government has also pledged to do more to raise public awareness by revamping the Get Safe Online website. It will also push software manufacturers to agree to a kitemark safety system.

A lot of this isn't particularly new or exciting, a fair amount of it is the sort of stuff which gets announced with no hope of it going anywhere in the mid to near future, or is aspirational (The "kitemark" system is the prime example here).

The two core elements for me are the creation of both military and civilian (or at least police) cyber warfare teams. The civilian one presumably will be aimed in part at domestic cybercrime, which is good, but will also inevitably overreach and end up being used for purposes which the creators never intended. If, within the first 3 years, the cybercrime police force hasnt been found to have been cracking the home email accounts of people like Occupy protesters.

The militarised force is clearly aimed at both China and Russia, now this is something which will be of interesting. The US also has a taskforce like this, US Cyber Command, which frankly sounds like something from a bad science fiction novel. Its not clear if there is anything positive coming from this team as yet, but who knows what the future holds?

The problem is that there is a huge disparity between what is being done in China and Russia, and what is being talked about here. In Russia and China "patriotic hackers" have been given virtually free reign without risk of prosecution, so long as they're pointed in the right direction. Compared to Russia China has shown a more organised and militarised style, but ultimately they are given freedom to act, so long as they do so in support of the state, or at least don't run counter to the overarching goals of the state. That means if you spend your lunch break cracking people's bank accounts then so be it, just make sure that when you're on the clock you're attacking websites belonging to people in Georgia you don't like.

This is where the strength of these organisations lies, they arent shacked to a political process, nor are they expected to conform to a diplomatic ruleset. There's no consequence if they, say, shut down a water pump to prove a point. There's always enough deniability to shrug it off and move on. It's clear that even in this case, there's some degree of confusion as to exactly what happened here, but frankly I trust the security experts who think it was a hack, rather than DHS, who have a vested interest in saying the systems didn’t get cracked.

In order to create a real UK Cyber Security force we need to take a page out of the books of those who are doing it best already, and there are three places for that, China, Russia and Anonymous. All three embrace freedom to action, tied to loose strategic goals, without getting the picture messy by demanding that their hackers try to conform to an artificial set of constraints.

The best hackers in the world are black hats, and former black hats (in my opinion). These are the guys who have to be able to crack security, evade police and other organisations who might be upset about that, and turn a profit at the end of the day. White hats (non criminal hackers) never have to develop the requisite skillset to operate against foreign governments.

If we want the best and the brightest to come in from the cold and start operating in support a national agenda is to create an environment where those who are the best, and thus most likely criminals, get something out the deal. That means immunity from prosecution, the ability to make a little profit on the side, and a general understanding that they will be directed from a strategic level, rather than a tactical level most of the time.

What will fail is a highly controlled set of computer science graduates who learned their skills from textbooks on hacking. It'll fail even most significantly if there is no clear agenda, and the objectives are purely defence. So its good that's whats being built.

Book Review: The Big Short

2011-11-23T21:47:00.003Z

I had initially planned to do a line by line dissection of the piece of shuddering inanity which was this article in Conservative Home. Written by Christian Guy simply by reading it I am personally driven to wanting to take drugs, if only to escape, for a few moments, the raw horror that was reading it. Boneheaded to the point of being mendacious, even now I crave sweet release from its flawed assumptions, and lines like this:

People take drugs for a variety of reasons, but in the CSJ’s experience there are some common drivers: chaotic and dysfunctional families, leading to family breakdown; educational failure; the hopelessness of welfare dependency and entrenched worklessness; severe personal debt; and a criminal justice system which can make drug and alcohol abuse more likely, not less.

Its always wonderful to read something like this, from a man who almost inevitably has close friends who regularly use illegal drugs (we all do, statistically speaking), and yet is too blinkered to realise that the reason most people take drugs is because drugs are god damn awesome, that's why so many people take the ones which are legal (alcohol and tobacco being the most common of a very wide field).

Anyway, the moronic gibberings of the Director of Policy for the Centre for Social Justice (I guess getting a real job was a bit tough) aside, I thought I'd focus instead on the superb gibberings of Michael Lewis and his book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.

I have an ongoing fascination with the financial crisis, in large part because I'm fascinated by almost anything which I struggle to understand. There are lots of books written about the causes and many of them are excellent, Too Big to Fail probably having been one of my favourites until now.

The book is largely about a group of guys who were smart enough to do the math and realise that sub-prime mortgages were a really really bad idea. So much so, they realised, that they would inevitably cause massive damage to the financial system. Realising this, they all positioned themselves to become extremely wealthy in the event that this collapse happened, a bet which I'm sure they're all very glad they made.

Two things struck me about this book, first, it is a superbly personal tale of a time which is usually discussed through the lens of obscure financial products, or individuals too high up the ladder to really engage with on a meaningful level. The characters in this book are much closer to the ground, and thus are significantly more interest.

The second is that this book is really honest about the fact that the financial sector as a whole is a morally corrupt place, staffed by people who have no interest in the security of tomorrow, if they can make a buck today. I realise this is not a surprise, but the way it is laid so bare by the characters in the book is almost painful in how stark it really is. People within the financial sector had to work really hard in order to lie to themselves about the insecurity that sub prime was creating within their industry, willful, wanton lying.

The the process of this self deceit the "bad" characters in the book (read: those in favour of sub prime) are cast as fools, or worse, willing participants in a system they know is flawed.

If I had to lay a criticism at the door of this book, is that there is a need for the author to have taken just a little longer in explaining some of the concepts which are regularly used. This would have made the book more useful for me as a reader, but ultimately, in the world of Wikipedia, I can get by somehow.

Overall a fascinating read and an insight into the largely hidden world of "shorting". Certainly made me want to go and set up a hedge fund.

Two ways to the cool kids table

2011-11-21T21:40:00.002Z

I've been reading a lot it seems over the last few weeks on Myanmar, which has recently been given the opportunity to Chair Asean through to 2014. This comes not long after a series of pro-democracy changes, with political prisoners released and Suu Kyi not only no longer under house arrest but free to stand for political office.

These steps towards a more liberal form of Government have resulted in the rewards of international community, with cautious praise being heaped on Myanmar. I imagine that it will, over time, also result in greater investment into the country, both from the private sector and in the form of inter-Governmental assistance. It's the first small step toward a more globalised state.

On the flip side, Iran continues to dominate the Middle East agenda with its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Everyone is very worried about this, although from the coverage, there's a lot of confusion about exactly why we're worried. The most obvious reason is that they might bomb Israel, or use a proxy to do so. The fact that Tehran would vanish in a flash of light and thunder about 20 minutes after the same happened to an Israeli city apparently wouldn't deter the country.

But reading between the lines, here's my though. The fear is that if Iran has the bomb then no one will be able to threaten them not to build a bomb (or do other stuff) any more. Having a bomb would mean having to talk to Iran as a grown up, rather than as a tinpot dictatorship.

Speaking of tinpot dictatorships with nuclear weapons, Pakistan did rather well out of its nuclear programme. It calmed relations with India (to some extent) and got America more heavily involved in mediating future disputes. The risks of nuclear conflict between the two counties still exist, but its a lot less likely that they'll go to war now they know any war would be utterly devastating for both countries.

So here's my hypothesis, there's two ways to get a leg up into the realms of the new globalising states. One is to pursue a route which involves greater liberalisation and moves towards a democracy, the other is to build a bomb. The first route is the one everyone likes, but the second one also works. It gets you something to trade and it means that its a lot harder for the rest of the world to aggressively influence your internal structures.

Now, there is one thing which is a risk. So far, no country has developed a nuclear weapon with a view to using it to close off their borders and tell the rest of the world to go to hell. China did to some extent, but in the end, globalisation's siren call was too much to resist.

So will Iran become that first state? My feeling is probably not. What they want is to feel like they have control over their internal structures, but those structures are already fraying. The youth of Iran don't want a future dominated by the mullahs, and the Government is increasingly at odds with the religious orders.

What the bomb will do in Iran is create a world in which the outside has to communicate with Iran, not through threats and bluster, but instead as statesmen. There are huge risks, but if history is any guide, the presence of a bomb in Iran will serve only to shift the way in which the state behaves, but not so far as to knock it off a trajectory it is already on.

Making things and reading stuff

2011-11-15T19:52:00.003Z

I've recently become slightly obsessed by the superb Make Projects website. I come from a family of engineers and I've always enjoyed the principle of building things, but I've never really gotten around to it. Fortuitously this discovery comes at the same time I find out that there's such a thing as the London Hackspace.

I can't imagine there's ever been a generation which is more disconnected from the ways in which things are actually made. I certainly have no real idea of how things are put together and why the devices I use every day do the things which they do.

In the next few weeks and months I'm hoping to get down to the Hackspace and become a member.

In other news, I'd thoroughly recommend keeping an eye on both the Al Jazeera and The Guardian's live feeds on Occupy Wall Street, which was evicted (quite possibly illegally) last night.

I also would suggest taking a look at the live feed, run by a guy called Tim (I think), in fact, you should be able to see it right here:

Anonymous and its evolution

2011-11-09T20:54:00.003Z

I'm going to firmly wedge my tongue in my cheek for the next couple of sentences, before getting to the meat of this evening's symposium.

The trouble with Anons is that they're a bunch of greasy 15 year old script kiddies sitting in their parent's basements spewing filth on the internet. But the problem with that statement is that's what people have been saying for many years now, pretty much since Anonymous (or indeed youth culture on the internet, going back to the BBSes of yesteryear). What that means in practice is that I, a 27 year old market research guy with a background in politics and communications, can happily say that I'm an Anon and have been for years.

This is the trouble with youth subcultures, the members tend to grow up and a lot of what they learned along the way sticks with them. Just as the hippy generation grew up, so lots of those who were early Anons are now educated and out there in the world. Pretty much everyone I know either is an Anon in some fashion, and those that aren't are aware of the culture, even if they don't know what it is they're referring to (I include pretty much anyone who has seen a lolcat in that context, see associated image, you have now seen Anon Culture)

Probably the best article there has ever been on Anonymous came out this week. That is not hyperbole, it is literally the best thing any credible person has ever written about Anonymous, at least that I've read. Quinn Norton successfully deconstructs the movement with seeming ease and identifies aspects of it which are rarely explored. Here's some of it, but if you do one thing today, stop reading this, and go read the whole article:

NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype.
“The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster),” she wrote in Social Text.

The trickster isn’t the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the character that exposes contradictions, initiates change and moves the plot forward. One minute, the loving and heroic trickster is saving civilization. A few minutes later the same trickster is cruel, kicking your ass and eating babies as a snack.

This is probably the crux of the issue, Anonymous ruins lives and saves cats, reveals paedophiles and crushes companies.

If I was going to pick up one thing to define Anonymous, it would be this, a short script which has long been at the core of the movement:

We are Anonymous
We do not Forgive
We do not Forget
We are Legion

Its worth noting that Legion is not just a randomly picked word for a group of people, its the name of another supernatural entity, a collective of demons who were driven out by Jesus.

It wasn’t until I downloaded and listened to Lulz: A corruption of LOL’s second album, Corruption, that I grasped what Anonymous really is.

It’s a culture.

It takes cultures to have albums, idioms, and iconography, and I was swimming in these and more. Anonymous is a nascent and small culture, but one with its own aesthetics and values, art and literature, social norms and ways of production, and even its own dialectic language.

It is no wonder we in the media and the wider culture are often confused. Any study of Anonymous must be anthropological, taking into account the way people exist in different societies. The media has just been looking for an organization with a leader who could explain why Anonymous seems to do weird things. Not only that, but Anonymous seems to be built around doing weird things, and even has a term for it: the lulz.

And there it is, the simple realisation which lifts this article out of the mire and up to a level which isnt usually explored. Anonymous is a culture. The thing which separates Anonymous from other subcultures, is that it is geographically unlimited, and in the end it exists entirely separate to day to day society. You can be an Anon and anything else you like, the two can co-exist, no one at work needs to know you're an Anon unless you tell them. The internet means everyone can contribute in any way they like and from those contributions can come meaningful results.

I don't want to quote any more of the article, because it deserves to be read in full, but here is what I alluded to at the start and I think is worth bearing in mind. Anonymous is growing up, and growing bigger. Those who founded the movement on /b/ are now in their 20's and 30's or older. Script kiddies are now full blown crackers, and intelligent well meaning members now have jobs and lives.

Personally I think this has resulted in offshoots of Anonymous like LulzSec, which is still as active as it ever was, cracking corporate security and stealing data like there's no tomorrow. It's also resulted in a greater Anonymous presence IRL (in real life). Its almost impossible to attend a protest now without seeing Anons. They tend to stand a little apart, be-suited, masked, watching and occasionally acting. The Occupy protests would be substantially less well organised but for the efforts of AnonOps and other similar services.

The question which no one is asking is what happens when those who grew up with Anonymous as a major part of their self identity are the ones running companies and getting elected.

Book review: The Pentagon's New Map

2011-11-07T20:14:00.002Z

Slightly late to the party, but I finally read Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map. I've been a fan of Barnett since watching his TED talk on the basis of a recommendation from a friend, but beyond his blog haven't until now read any of his books.

New Map is (in my mind at least) a book about the need to rediscover a more clearly stated purpose for American power. Barnett's thesis is that this should be to protect, foster and guide globalisation, by bringing more countries into the realm of well connected and co-operating nations (The Core), and out of the largely dictatorial, undeveloped and conflict ridden areas which exist elsewhere (The Gap).

The part of New Map I personally like the most is that it seeks to create a framework for a grand strategy, not only for the USA but also for other countries like the UK which exist in the Core. Barnett proposes re purposing the US military (any many other elements of the US Government) in particular in order to develop a set of tools more suited for the messy and unpleasant business of dealing with all the conflict and chaos that exists in the world.

The core elements of this are a "Leviathan" force and a sys-admin force. The Leviathan force is essentially already there, the US military can knock over pretty much any country in the world without breaking a sweat. The only countries it couldn't easily roll over are countries which exist in co-operation (broadly) with globalisation and the US.

What doesnt exist, and in truth hasnt shown a great deal of evidence of emerging since the book was written, is the sys-admin force. This force would be one set up for dealing with the mess which comes when shutting down a conflict. It would be a type of peacekeeping force (and I diminish a great deal with Barnett's analysis when I call it that) with teeth.

If anything, the sys-admin force has been replaced by the increased use of unmanned drones to monitor and with greater frequency attacks on militants and suspected militants. These tools are cheap, disposable and pretty much divorce the user from any form of risk and responsibility. The problem is that these tools do nothing in terms of actually shutting down a conflict, but instead provide an impetus for elongating conflicts.

I'm actually surprised by the fact that when discussing a sys-admin force Barnett doesnt discuss in more detail how other countries could become involved in this. One of America's strengths, traditionally, has been the forging of multilateral alliances, either independently, or through existing international institutions. This strength has diminished in recent years however, both as a result of a seeming indifference to achieving these sorts of ends, and due to the emergence of other powerful international actors.

Ultimately, what Barnett's book is, is a challenge particularly to America, but also to other Core nations, to rethink their approach to the world, abandoning national self interest in favour of the more important trend of Globalisation. Its a deeply idealistic text, which is rare when discussing grand strategy.

Well worth reading for its scope, concept and the depth which the core issues are explored.

Creating a peaceful insurgency

2011-10-30T08:26:00.003Z

I'm going to stick a proviso right up front here, when I say insurgency, I do not mean a violent insurgency. I mean an attempt to reshape the state through the use of widespread civil unrest. I don't believe there's any need for there to be violence in a democratic society. So...

It looks like the Occupy movement in London is approaching a critical point in it's development, as Church authorities meet with protesters this morning, and Christian groups begin to declare their support for the protest. In the background the police and Government are clearly working to create a legal basis to remove the camp from its current site.

Support is starting to flow in from other sources too. When I was there the other night there were a couple of Union spokesmen there, pledging their support. I was slightly disheartened to hear the phrase "Tory scum" coming over the megaphone, but it's not like thats wildly unexpected, and certainly doesn’t change my support for the movement. It remains to be seen if the big Unions will come out officially in support and start sending their members down to the protest.

Everyone seems to be preparing for the big showdown with police, but in my opinion, that's a distraction. As has been shown in the US time and again, police tearing down tents doesn't end the protest, it just means everyone moves around a bit and then sets back up again. It's nearly impossible to arrest someone on any meaningful basis for protesting after all.

Now is the time to look beyond the police action, and indeed see police action as an opportunity. It will draw public attention back to the protests again, and hopefully start to shift the poisonous perspective which many have of the protests.

Recently Egyptian activists visited Occupy Wall Street, and were, by all accounts, slightly disappointed by what they found:

A few hundred demonstrators fell in line behind her and Maher, who gamely joined the English chants. The police allowed the march onto Wall Street itself, and at each corner the American leaders consulted an officer about the preferred route. Weary of the somewhat stilted slogans, which lacked the umph and rhythm of Egyptian chants, Mahfouz and Maher taught the crowd the iconic cry of the Arab uprisings: "Al shaab yurid isqat al nizam," or "The people demand the fall of the regime." The crowd adopted its own hybrid: "Al shaab yurid isqat Wall Street."
As they wound back to Zuccotti Park, demonstrators awaited a cue from the police before crossing Broadway. It was too much for Mahfouz. She stopped in the middle of the intersection, stopped traffic, pumped a fist in the air, and demanded the fall of Wall Street. Nervous demonstrators skittered to the sidewalk, leaving Mahfouz with just the cameras and a few dozen stalwarts who seemed willing to accept her invitation to be arrested.

For a few seconds, there was a palpable crackle of tension. But the police, it seemed, didn't want the hassle. They stepped back, and without a confrontation, the moment subsided. Mahfouz joined her comrades back on the sidewalk.

"I wanted to show them that they need to be tough, even if they get arrested," she said with her trademark toothy smile. With that, she repaired for a private session with Occupy organizers -- she had finally found them -- and the long trip back to Cairo the following day.

I write this almost wincing, as I know people will froth at the mouth at my next point. One of the most important lessons learned by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in recent years is that Western structures of law and order allow people to work against the state in meaningful ways, without going outside the boundaries of the law. Abu Mus'ab al-Suri used this principle throughout his life, using the British legal system as a shield, whilst retaining his identity as a pen jihadi.

It goes without saying that there is no similarity between Occupy protesters and Al Qaeda, however, the principle of using the law as a shield remains true. Peaceful protest is protected in a half a dozen ways by laws, both at the national and the international level. The only tool the police can use is to make the protest as inconvenient as possible, like taking generators from Occupy protesters in New York the day before it snows.

The more aggressive the policing, the higher the cost for the police, both in financial terms, but also in terms of morale. In the wake of the shocking actions of police in Oakland the Occupy movement there couldn’t be in a better position. The movement there has had an injection of public support in the wake of the brutal attack by police on war veteran Scott Olsen.

More importantly it has driven a wedge between the city government and its police. The local government has been forced to back down and allow the protest back, which the police are saying is a mistake. With these two forces deadlocked, the protesters are in control. That is insurgency, putting the institutions which are seeking to remove you in conflict with each other.

The raw cost of policing these outbreaks of protest will also start to show itself in the near future, particularly if police where police start to take a heavier hand. Police in the UK, when being drawn into policing civil unrest, are paid extra for their time, by a large margin. All the logistics cost money. And it wears down police to have to go head to head with people day after day. Again, a core part of an insurgency, creating a situation where it is simply too expensive, in terms of finance and manpower, to prevent the insurgency running its course.

The key problem for the movement in the UK right now is mobilisation of support. Its always a problem in the UK, people are apathetic about pretty much everything. Right now the movement needs to stop making its case to traditional supporters, and start making its case to people. This requires a change in mindset, away from being inwardly looking, towards the external audience which right now is largely turned against protesters (another feature of the great British public).

At the core of any insurgency is the removal of people from supporting the Government to your own side. In this case it means turning people away from their apathy about the financial sector.

Right now unemployment in London is sitting at around 6%, maybe a little lower. Thats a staggeringly large number of people sitting around, with little to fill the day. My question, and my challenge, to protesters, is how do you get them on their feet and to come out to support you? Occupy in the US has shown it is possible, and I believe it would be here too.

As winter closes in, the challenges of Occupy around the globe will proliferate. It will be the most difficult time. However, it is also the critical time. It will show whether the movement is truly self sustaining at this point, or whether it is simply a bunch of kids with nothing better to do with their time.

Disclaimer: I'm a supporter of Occupy, I've donated food and time to the protests in London and money to protests in the US. I'm proud of that. This piece is written in part as a call to action and partly as a thought piece.

People have asked me how I reconcile my support for Occupy with my Conservative views, and here's my simple answer, I don't have to agree with the other guy's solutions to recognise we both have a problem with the same thing.

Disruptive innovation

2011-10-29T21:38:00.002+01:00

I've been thinking a bit recently about the importance of disruptive vs iterative change. I recently moved to a job where I get to work a lot with blue chip clients, whats interesting about the technology sector however, is that rather than striving for the bleeding edge, most companies operate on the basis of iterative improvement.

There are of course companies which do well at being innovative and disruptive. Apple is probably the one which would spring to the minds of most people. In the last few years they have done more to re-invent the technology field than any other company. Moving us away from static PCs towards light weight mobile technology. That technology has proliferated through the world, driving down cost and enabling a boom in communications into areas of the world which previously struggled to access these types of technology. From the Guardian article:

In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500 million. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life.

And how are these devices altering the way people live?

Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office. It is cheap, easy to use and, for millions of Africans unable to access a bank account or afford the hefty charges of using one, nothing short of revolutionary.

Thats not just a change, that's a shift in the rulesets of entire countries, contained in devices which fit in a pocket and are within the financial reach of the vast majority of the world's population.

A hat tip to Dan Tapscott for the next piece, the piece which really locked me in to the idea of disruptive technology in this context. Amazon posted some disappointing results recently, and the market reacted badly:

On Tuesday, Amazon.com reported third-quarter earnings that fell far short of Wall Street's expectations. Its earnings were down 73% from the quarter a year earlier and it missed the analysts' consensus estimate of $0.24 per share by nearly a dime. By all accounts, this was a sizable earnings miss and the stock responded as such, dropping as much as 20% in afterhours trading.

Now even to my limited understanding of finance, that seems like a bad day for Amazon, but as it transpires, the reality is significantly more complex, and in that complexity lies the more important story:

Amazon missed its earnings because the company has been investing more heavily than Wall Street expected. And these investments are being made in the infrastructure to support not just a single disruptive business, but a number of disruptive-growth opportunities. Below is a snapshot of Amazon's portfolio of disruptive businesses:
Amazon Retail — disrupting traditional retailers
Amazon Kindle — disrupting the paper book format and paper book retailers
CreateSpace — a self-publishing solution that disrupts traditional publishing houses
Kindle Fire Tablet — a new market disruption enabled by business model innovation
Amazon MP3 and streaming audio and video — disrupting traditional content distribution companies
Amazon Web Services — disrupting the companies that sell on-site servers and native software applications

Now, like Google, Amazon pursues a policy by which some of its innovations will fail, but there's little sense in the market punishing either company for investing in technologies and ideas which will fundamentally alter the way in which different businesses work.

There's something fascinating in the market's response to this situation, which deserves its own analysis, but the simple question is, what does it say about the financial market, that a company which is investing vast amounts in new ideas is punished. It seems to me that the idea is to promote the mundane, because that leads to smoother curves on balance sheets. But there you go.

Disruptive change is a tool which is nigh on impossible to factor into strategy, because it involves changing rulesets. Altering rulesets is something which is much easier to have applied to you, or to take advantage of, rather than to develop yourself. Yet iterative change is so rarely truly successful, you end up relying on others having a slower cycle of improvement than you.

Building disruptive change into strategy also means being able to adapt your strategy on the fly, whilst keeping a keen eye on the final objective. Only changes which move you closer to the goal at greater speed should be adopted, whereas others must be dis-guarded, no matter how fascinating their employment might seem.

New ideas also aren’t necessarily the only way of implementing disruptive change. Old and traditional techniques, applied at the right time and in the right way, can shift the course of a campaign. On this topic, its worth reading on this topic is Rick Perry and His Eggheads, which details some of the ways in which the Perry campaign for Governor of Texas used a disruptive technology (real statistical analysis of the outcomes of campaign advertising) to change the way traditional technology (campaign advertising) was implemented.

The mundane will always be more appealing, mainly because it works. But the more disruptive the approach, the greater the impact.

The need to protect hacktivism

2011-10-27T15:38:00.004+01:00

I've been pondering a lot (as if this wasn't already evident) on protest. Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights has this to say:

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. this article shall not prevent the imposition of lawful restrictions on the exercise of these rights by members of the armed forces, of the police or of the administration of the State.

I post the full text so as to make clear I'm not selectively choosing. But the important thing to note here is the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of association. Here's my issue, whilst these protections have traditionally been used to as the basis for public protest, no one has truly made the case that these same protections would also apply to hacktivism.

Another definition is really needed at this point, hacktivisim is "the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends". (Its sad the best definition of this underdiscussed topic is in Wikipedia). However, hacktivism and hacking have become more or less percieved as the same thing, as if defacing a website (hacktivism) is comparable to stealing people's identities off a website (hacking)

Of course its not. In September of this year hackers defaced Syrian Government websites, in January hackers reputed to be part of the Anonymous collective did much the same to Egyptian Government websites, the same has happened in the US, UK, China... lets just say the list goes on and on.

Theres a case to be made that peaceful hacktivism is about the type of protest least likely to have an impact on people's lives. Its like putting up a banner thats hard to get down, and leaving it there. You know eventually someone will pull it down, but lots of people will see it in the interim, and it doesn't hurt anyone.

Of course theres a darker side. Often data is also stolen during the hack. Its hard to break into a website and not have access to more than its graphical layout. Often hackers will take and make use of this access. Witness Anonymous's campaign again Aaron Barr, in which dedicated hackers not only undertook acts of hacktivism, but also destroyed his company and his personal reputation. I've got little sympathy for Barr, he's a man who clearly hates personal privacy and free speech, and he bit off a lot more than he could chew, so that happened.

The problem is that the law has yet to mature enough to recognise that if there should be a distinction drawn between acts of peaceful hacktivism and acts of malicious hacking. People have the freedom to associate, and the freedom to act collectively on their beliefs, the idea that an outdated concept like geography should have any bearing on that association is absolute foolishness. Protests transcend borders, the Arab Spring and Occupy being the two best recent examples. The internet drives this capacity, and there should be an enshrining in law that these networks can be used to peacefully disrupt the person you are protesting against.

The issue ultimately, is that Governments are opposed to protest. That's simple fact. Its disruptive, expensive and ultimately annoying, hence why protests are so severely constrained in this country and most of the Western world. The way in which the right to protest is framed in most cases barely takes into account the idea people can make telephone calls, let alone co-operate with people on the opposite side of the planet to achieve a single end goal.

The reason hacktivism is almost certainly never going to get legal protection, is that its actually an effective form of protest. Standing outside someone's corporate HQ and shouting is more or less a worthless endeavour (most of the time, sometimes it works). However, shut down a company's website and replace it with something that supports your cause, and that could be seen by millions of people.

Its a flaw in our political system, and indeed almost all political systems, that laws are irrelevant within a few years of writing, particularly when it comes to communications, the internet, and technology. But the one area where we could make meaningful progress is the use of technology to inspire and protest freedom of thought, expression and action. Protest is an integral part of that. We should, and must, seek to find ways in which people can protest peacefully online, to continue to criminalise such activity is a sign of a society uncomfortable with the idea that people should be able to act freely, when no harm is caused to another.

Blogging delayed

2011-10-27T12:19:00.001+01:00

Have two pieces in the pipeline delayed by a sudden surge in work. Will be on the case soon!

The challenge of being a Conservative

2011-10-20T19:49:00.002+01:00

The inimitable Tim Montgomerie wrote a piece the other day on the differences between the Conservative Party we have, and the Conservative Party we need. Stepping aside from the fact that every time I read it I hear the voice of Christian Bale's Batman character, its worth reviewing the core strategic differences he sees as being important:

A shift towards a turbo-charged growth strategy that will allow us to compete in a world where the eurozone crisis and the BRIC nations both threaten our prosperity;
A popular compassionate conservatism that addresses the dangerous sense that we don't understand ordinary people;
A rention of the deficit strategy but a shift in focus towards job creation.

The man has a point, current Conservative obsession with having an in/out referendum on the Eurozone is a key part of why the Party fails so dramatically to engage with people.

A friend of mine, a long time back, told me of the benefits of thinking about "real people" in politics. Its probably the thing which led to my slow abandonment of the idea that Left/Right divides in politics serve any purpose other than to alienate people. Most people just want tomorrow to be better than today, and don't care for politicians who are seen to be messing about with Europe when there arent enough jobs and they keep getting poorer every day.

There is also a kind of viciousness which exists within the Conservative Party, today exemplified by Louise Mensch MP, who had the following to say about the Occupy protest outside St Pauls:

Any legitimate protest should be time-limited. No group of protestors should ever be allowed to hijack public space.

I don't have a problem with public space for protest, just hijacking it by staying. Have a protest, make point, move on.

Its hard to know where to start with comments like these. I'm not sure she quite understands the point of protest for a start. I'm also not sure she quite has understood that if every protest was just a bunch of people turning up, making noise and going home they wouldnt be any different from tourists. Ultimately, what bothers me is the confrontational element.

I'm a supporter of the Occupy movement, and I'm Right wing. I think banks are vast social parasites who have created a benefits system for the ultra rich. I don't like it, any more than I like anyone else who cheats on benefits. I don't like businesses which can't survive on their own merits and I don't like the fact that the political system has increasingly decided to divorce itself from people, replacing them instead with lobbyists.

The situation with Liam Fox is a fine example of this growing problem. No one, literally no one, who thought it through would have thought his relationship with Werrity was appropriate. But, he existed in a system where his behaviour was allowed and condoned, and honestly, I can't blame him for that. But again, real people, when looking at it, see two corrupt men who used the political system for their own personal benefit.

As usual, Chris Christie gets it, he had this to say about the Occupy movement in the US:

"I understand why they're angry. Because you look down at what's happening in Washington, D.C., it should disgust all of us. You have a president who's unwilling to drag people to the same room and bang heads and force solutions. You have Congress in both parties who won't talk to each other. ... At the same time we have people out in the country who are suffering. And they're playing games in Washington, D.C."

Now thats the tone. Empathy and comprehension combined. Its no different here to the US, people see a political system which is not being run for their benefit and they are reacting badly, not just with the Occupy protests in London (which are ultimately very small), but with their increasing disinterest in politics.

The problem is, the more I look at it, the more I'm concerned that it is the Conservative Party who are a key driving force behind this disillusionment. The narrative of their distance from real people is already well established and theres little to show in this Parliament which suggests that there has been any significant change. Policies and politics is not being reformed, the average person is seeing no benefit from the system, in fact they see only that things are getting steadily worse.

The Conservative Party we need is one which faces up to the fact that people are what is at the core of politics. That understands that supporting big business is important, but only in the context of creating jobs and paying their dues in the form of taxes to society as a whole. And finally, a Party which is willing to reform itself to find a new equilibrium with people.

Occupying London

2011-10-16T20:42:00.005+01:00

So, I've spent the majority of the last two days down at the Occupy encampment outside St Pauls. I've been curious as to how the movement would translate over here and I'm glad I managed to get there.

Overall it was an extremely positive experience, the people there have a proactive attitude and theres none of the anger amongst protesters which you might expect. You get the sense that most people there genuinely want to make the world a somewhat better place.

As with the OWS movement there is no clearly defined objective, nor are the people universally of one political persuasion or type. Its honestly been a while where I've gone to a protest and felt like if I told people I was a Conservative I wouldnt be insulted or jeered at. Its a nice change, since I've had some pretty unpleasant things said to me.

Many of the tools from New York have been adapted and when I went down on the second day there was real evidence of infrastructure emerging. A food area, recycling, a wifi zone and a first aid tent were all in evidence and staffed by volunteers. The food and wifi areas were both consistently busy, both with people buying, but also with people bringing along donations. I'm seriously considering taking along an old laptop as soon as I've had a chance to format it.

The only downside was the inevitable heavy handed approach by the Metropolitan Police. Its sad because I'm a big supporter of the police, but watching them yesterday relentlessly try and provoke a peaceful crowd into an angry confrontation was deeply disappointing. Repeated claims that they didnt kettle protesters are a flat out lie.

However, the protesters were well prepared and made sure that they dealt with police pressure without confrontation. I saw a couple of people "disarm" one protester who got angry, putting their arms around him and leading him away from the police lines to make sure he didn't give officers an excuse. I did see one arrest, I've got no idea whether it was deserved or not. It was very unpleasant to watch, I'll say that much.

On the second day the picnic atmosphere had continued. Apparently St Pauls have given the protest their blessing (no pun intended) and as such they'll be able to stay more easily on the site. I hope they do. I'm going to try and get back during the week to see further whats going on.

The London protesters have taken the best of whats worked in the US, speed and flexibility of response, avoiding confrontation, including infrastructure to support the protest in the longer term, and implemented it here. Whether or not that is enough to build a lasting and growing protest in the heart of London remains to be seen.

Occupy all of the things!

2011-10-09T13:42:00.003+01:00

I've been following the Occupy Wall Street protests pretty much since they started, and despite an early rocky start, with little media attention, they have finally started to penetrate the mainstream media and the public consciousness. The American press is still somewhat resistant to covering the protests (with cries of "but its too difficult to figure out what they want" in abundance), however the Guardian and Al Jazeera have done sterling work covering the issues.

Ultimately refusing to cover the protests because its hard to pin down what the protesters want is an incredible cop-out. Thematically they are pretty simple, people in the US (and increasingly abroad) have given up on their Governments, seeing them as a barrier to progress, and have instead decided to go to the institutions which they see as being responsible for the ongoing decline they see around them, banks.

What makes these protests interesting is how teched up they are, and how that technology is fuelling a growing protest movement which is steadily spreading to other cities. John Robb has done an excellent write up of the structure of the protests and how they've been organised:

Open source protest is an organizational technique. Probably the only organizational technique that can assemble a massive crowd in today's multiplexed environment. Essential rules of open source protest include:
A promise. A simple goal/idea that nearly everyone can get behind. Adbusters did pretty good with "occupy wall street." Why? Nearly everyone hates the pervasive corruption of banks and Wall Street. It's an easy target.
A plausible promise. Prove that the promise can work. They did. They actually occupied Wall Street and set up camp. They then got the message out.
A big tent and an open invitation. It doesn't matter what your reason for protesting is as long as you hate/dislike Wall Street. The big tent is already in place (notice the diversity of the signage). Saw something similar from the Tea Party before it was mainstreamed/diminished.
Let everyone innovate. Don't create a leadership group. The general assembly approach appears to work.
Support anyone in a leadership role that either a) grows the movement or b) advances the movement closer to its goal. Oppose (ignore) anybody that proposes a larger, more complex agenda or those that claim ownership over the movement.
If a new technique works, document it, use it again, and share it with everyone else. Copy everything that works.
Spread the word of the movement as widely as possible.

So far pretty much all of these points are covered, and the movement appears to be self sustaining. Interesting fringe support groups have emerged, particularly amongst people who can't participate directly. The 99 Percent blog for example is providing an outlet for people to describe the misery of living in a society where someone with a degree can't find work and has become convinced they never will. It also breaks down some of the ideas that the supporters of this movement are young disenfranchised people.

Increasingly the movement is growing to represent the original Tea Party, before it was hijacked by the Koch Brothers and their ilk to garner support for the Republican Party (a very smart and successful attempt to both disarm something annoying and re purpose it). This post on the FedUpUSA site (hat tip to Charles Cameron) sums it up nicely:

There are a few nuts in the OWS crowd, but from what I hear “Occupy Wall Street” is about bringing the fraudsters to justice. Its about changing the banker/government dynamic that runs this country. It’s about free markets. It’s about ending endless debt. It’s about stopping the wars. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the libertarian soul of America.
Since the TP lost the focus of addressing the root problems of America, they remain unresolved.

It’s sad, really. The TP talks about sewer legislation, redistricting, and supporting House Speaker Boehner’s plan to add $2 trillion in debt, while the real issue is Congress has spent more than it takes in, and the costs of the promises outweigh the means to pay them. In the process, you and I are less free than we used to be.

There was no place left for folks to go.

This raises an interesting concern which I think is going to be increasingly important in our society as time goes by. Networks are growing increasingly tamper proof. Once upon a time it was tough but not impossible to take ahold of a protest organisation and redirect it, people are increasingly savvy to attempts to do so, and whilst they can't stop someone like the Koch brothers, they will simply leave and set up their own new mechanisms. As the recent Kickstarter fundraiser for Occupy shows, even money is growing to be less of an object. $73,000 and counting makes for a good chunk of cash to use to keep people sitting outside Wall Street and shouting.

Self sustaining and self reinforcing networks are a key component in any insurgency, and increasingly this movement appears to be a (peaceful) insurgency. As it continues to spread there are more opportunities to out manoeuvre the police and others who want to shut the protests down. The movement will also start to bleed police dry after a certain amount of time. How long can the police lock down Wall Street? Its a huge drain on resources, manpower and time, and the protesters have significantly more of all three.

And lets say that the one outside Wall Street gets shut down and moved on... well what's to stop them turning up at Times Square the next day, and outside the 9/11 memorial site the day after? The police can only move so fast, wheras the protesters can simply check online and see where they should be going for greatest effect. What happens when New York has 2 protests, or 3, or 5, all going on simultaneously. Its not like the city is lacking for unemployed people with time to burn and an axe to grind.

Two interesting things are likely to happen in the next few weeks and months, first, its going to get cold, second, the financial system is likely to undergo further shocks. Both these factors will have implications for the protesters. Can they keep people out as the weather grows brutually cold? And how many more people will turn out the next time the Government pours vast amounts into the financial sector to no appreciable effect?

The OWS movement increasingly resembles the protests in the Middle East and sub Saharan Africa, where the protesters never went home, because... well why would they? They have no jobs, they have no prospects under the current system, and a life living in a tent city isnt much worse than what they left behind.

I'm going to write some more on self sustaining networks soon, as my brain is still working out some of the things I want to say, but suffice it to say OWS is here to stay, and its here to spread. London kicks off next weekend and I fully intend to take a look. Anonymous masks to the ready and such.

Book Review: Architect of Global Jihad

2011-10-04T21:36:00.002+01:00

A slight confession, I'm a couple of dozen pages off finishing Architect of Global Jihad by Brynjar Lia, but I have a couple of other things on my reading list at the moment which I'm also keen to finish, so I'm going to jump the gun and write a review. This is probably bad luck or something, but I'm a brave enough man to risk it all.

Recommended by ZenPundit the book charts the life of Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, a profoundly intelligent and compelling character who was a key component in the creation of a true intellectual underpinning for global terror. He is the dark side of writers who have helped write the 21st centuries counter insurgency doctrines, indeed he is one of the reasons we need such comprehensive new strategies.

The book chronicles his life, taking us through the various phases of his development, which are both rich and varied. His meanderings through the Middle East and Europe serve as a powerful reminder of the ability jihadis (and all terrorists) have to move through society, often without leaving a trace.

In my opinion the insight this book gives the reader into the life of a jihadi (albeit a jihadi thinker, rather than perhaps a do-er) are just as valuable as charting the construction of the theories al-Suri is responsible for. Often the media and others describe these men as if they are quite literally sneaking down darkened alleyways at the dead of night, but this book shows that a man can hold extreme views and live a life which is at times shockingly normal.

This book also shatters the idea that jihadis are frothing madmen clawing at Western civilisation. Al-Suri is clearly well read and understands not only his own cause, but the cause of his enemy and is more than willing to learn about them in order to achieve his own goals. He reads widely throughout his life, and uses publicly available information on counter-insurgency to theorise on how to improve insurgency as a discipline.

His theories describe what modern al-Qaeda almost became, before its near complete collapse in recent years, a wholly decentralised entity subscribing to a set of principles and interacting as little as possible. This self sustaining entity is truly worrisome, if only because one day, it could be created and set loose on the world. Indeed it has been suggested that Mexican cartels are busy adapting the al-Qaeda model to further their own activities against the Mexican Government.

Probably one of the most important books on jihadism. Detailing as it does the sheer diversity of what that truly means. It paints a vivid picture of a movement struggling to find its own identity, and finally having one imposed upon it by America in the shape of Al-Qaeda. The characters are rich and fascinating, three dimensional in a way which is rarely seen even in the better pieces of scholarship.

Highly recommended to anyone.

Afghan Obsession

2011-10-02T12:22:00.004+01:00

The BBC has recently done a series of shows about the UK military, including the truly excellent Our War, as well as Sandhurst and Young Soldiers. These shows provide a degree of access which goes well beyond what I've seen before, and serve to demystify army life. Giving this type of access to the realities of training and combat is a bold move on the part of the army, and I think its worked out well for all concerned.

For those who haven't as yet had a chance to see them it's well worth taking the time. If you're American I'm sorry the BBC is so crap at providing you with access and obviously I don't think you should go and have a look at the various sites which specialise in putting BBC documentaries online for non-Brits to view.

What has been most striking to me is the fact that one word occurs about every two minutes in every episode of every one of these shows, that word is "Afghanistan". In fact, as I was typing this, one of the Sandhurst trainees said something incredibly telling (slightly paraphrased)

The place is changing in response to Afghanistan

Every one of these soldiers is submerged in a world in which they are training to fight one enemy, in one place, for one reason, and that to me could be a huge problem for the future.

Obviously these is a lot of the training which is clearly usable in any environment, but the amount of training which focusses on the Taliban is quite staggering. Every simulated enemy is a Taliban soldier, every hypothetical exercise is about them too. No one talks about anything other than going to Afghanistan to fight.

As military budgets continue to shrink, and the military itself trains its soldiers to deal only with one set of circumstances, what implications will not only reverberate through a generation, but will be exacerbated over time. When reading Defeat into Victory I was struck by how powerfully Slim argues against the idea of special forces soldiers, instead believing that all soldiers should be trained in as many types of combat as possible, leading to greater flexibility, but also higher morale across all the forces, since there is less sense of an "elite" who are "better" than the average fighting man.

In the future it remains to be seen whether our military is able to deal with the wars of the future, and view them through something other than the lens of Afghanistan. Will soldiers who have been trained in counter insurgency warfare be able to cope with a massed tank assault (recognising this is currently unlikely, but wholly possible), or a battle against enemies who have been professionally trained (possibly even at Sandhurst, which trains plenty of troops who could one day be on the 'other side').

Flexibility of approach is a key to victory, in any campaign (and I include the political in this), and there is a worrying theme emerging that the next generations of our soldiers are not being trained to fight in anything other than the current war, one we are already looking to end.

From the Narco-War

2011-09-26T20:51:00.002+01:00

My fascination with the Mexican Narco War has only kicked into higher gear thanks to the latest series of Breaking Bad (probably one of the finest things on screens of any size). If you're not watching it, you're a bad person, there you go, I said it.

This post isn't intended to posit anything particularly important, but is rather just to draw together a selection of things which I've been reading recently on the topic:

Boing Boing had an excellent selection of images from a meth lab South of the border. I have no idea what I'm looking at when I see something like this, but I'm pretty sure just from the quantities of chemicals in the background of some of the shots its a pretty massive operation.

This report by Dr. Robert J. Bunker (who also writes for the inimitable and invaluable Small Wars Journal) makes for grim reading, making a strong strategic argument for the US to rethink its position on the Middle East, suggesting instead that the emphasis should be on dealing with the growing danger from the South. The title "Criminal (Cartel & Gang) Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: What you need to know, not what you want to hear" speaks to the simple truth that no one wants to deal with the problem, even as it gnaws its way into the marrow of Mexican society.

Finally, an article from the Guardian (dated 2008, but still enormously relevant) on how Guinea-Bissau has become the world's first Narco State. With countries like Mexico slowly losing the battle against cartels it's possible that this small West African state won't be the only country which is run for and by criminal enterprise.

I will be writing a piece in the near future, revisiting the world of 3D printing, and its potential impact on conflicts like the one in Mexico, but that will have to wait for another day.

Good news from the Republican Campaign trail?

2011-09-26T20:25:00.003+01:00

I had another post in mind for tonight but got distracted by reading this excellent piece by Nate Silver, on the potential entrance of Chris Christie into the Republican race for 2012.

Previous readers will know I have a fondness for Christie myself, and have written about his a couple of times. Silver discussed in depth the potential for Christie to enter the 2012 race, something which I think many moderate Republicans will want. Speaking as a right wing moderate (with Libertarian seasoning) I've been pretty horrified by the Republican field this year, it seems dominated by the frothings of Rick Perry and Bachmann, with Mitt Romney doing his best to see interesting and like he has a policy position.

Silver asks the important question of where would Christie syphon votes from if he did enter the race. Personally my view would be that he would displace Romney, who he shares the most common policy ground with. However, I think he would also provide a fresh, dominant voice taking a more coherent and sensible policy platform, which would draw away from the Perry/Bachmann crazy camp.

The media narrative would also be supportive, Christie is relatively well liked by the right wing media, but has done well in not creating significant enemies amongst the left wing (or at least that's my perception). Particularly as the race moves beyond its initial "entertainment" phase, to the period in which candidates are actually expected to be candidates instead of clowns, Christie is likely to be able to argue that the moves he has made in New Jersey could be scaled up to a national platform.

He would also be one of the few candidates who would be likely to appeal on a national platform in the general, something which at the moment I don't believe anyone is able to do. Floating voters, it seems, are unlikely to be drawn to any of the existing candidates and will either vote for Obama (again) or simply not vote. A moderate Republican with a strong story to tell on fiscal reform (albeit at a state level) would appeal to many, particularly if he is able to well articulate his positions on issues like gun control and immigration, where he is to the left of the Republican mainstream (but not so far out of touch as to wholly alienate him from the Republican base).

It also shouldnt be forgotten that Christie has already done a little bit of work on presenting himself as a potential successor to Obama (more on that below)

Silver does a solid analysis of several of the core policy issues being discussed at the moment and where Christie stands on them:

Gun Control. New Jersey, a mostly suburban state, tends to take a moderate position on gun control, and Mr. Christie has in the past as well. In 2009, Mr. Christie’s campaign rebutted a claim by his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine, that he stood with the N.R.A. by pointing out that Mr. Christie supported the assault weapons ban and opposed concealed carry laws. A statement on Mr. Christie’s campaign Web site in 2009 said that he supported New Jersey’s existing gun control laws, which are fairly strict.
The Environment and Global Warming. During the 2009 campaign, Mr. Christie sometimes critiqued Governor Corzine’s performance on the environment from the left, and he won the endorsement of the New Jersey Environmental Foundation, the first statewide Republican candidate to do so in 30 years.
More recently, however, Mr. Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program. But while so doing, he stated explicitly that global warming was real and manmade and endorsed the views of the consensus of climate scientists. Mr. Christie has also opposed plans to drill for oil off of New Jersey’s coast.
Immigration. In 2008, Mr. Christie, then a United States attorney, stated that “being in this country without proper documentation is not a crime.” The statement drew a harsh critique from CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who called for Mr. Christie’s resignation, and is a good bet to make a reappearance in one of his opponent’s campaign commercials should Mr. Christie enter the race.
Mr. Christie has received an F from NumbersUSA, an organization that favors greater restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration.
Social Issues. Mr. Christie is an opponent of both abortion rights and same sex marriage, but his campaign Web site in 2009 stated that he had “no issue with same sex couples sharing contractual rights,” an apparent reference to New Jersey’s existing civil unions law.
In 2010, Mr. Christie broke with other prominent Republicans by accusing his party of “overreacting” to the proposed construction of an Islamic mosque and cultural center near the ground zero site, although he also criticized President Obama’s position on the issue.
‘Post-Partisan’ Branding. Although in some ways Mr. Christie’s outspoken, no-holds-barred style might seem like an antidote to Mr. Obama, whom Mr. Christie has criticized for weak leadership, there have also been times when Mr. Christie’s messaging has resembled that of the president.
One noteworthy example is a video that Mr. Christie’s campaign released in the closing days of the 2009 campaign. It featured extended and positively framed clips of Mr. Obama, who was more popular then, and interspersed images of supporters of Mr. Christie and Mr. Obama, implying that Mr. Christie would be in the legacy of Mr. Obama’s mandate for “change”.

So there you have it. At this stage it seems unlikely Christie will throw his hat into the ring. Personally I think he was hoping he could wait until 2016, and go head to head with a new Democratic challenger, rather than against and incumbent president, however it's entirely feasible that he could decide now is the time. A 2012 run might even help him in 2016, revealing weaknesses and gaps in his platform which could be plugged in the following four years (assuming he doesn't win)

Fingers crossed, if only because it might inject some real energy into a primary season which seems to have become mired in the petty bickering of people who barely scrape together credibility inside their own party, let alone on the international stage.

Its been a while...

2011-09-25T18:50:00.002+01:00

Its been some months since my last attempt to relaunch the blog and despite best intentions that failed rather dramatically. However, I've now left the job which was consuming the vast majority of my time and am about to embark on a week off and then on to a new job which I think will give me a significantly better work/life balance, so its my intention to try and pick things up where I left off.

Over the next few months I'll be looking to reconfirm my objectives in starting this blog, that is to discuss, at a level I feel comfortable with, campaigning, strategy, digital communications and topics of that nature. There'll also be plenty of "hey, this interested me" pieces, on things like Anonymous, good bits of fiction I've been reading, and the other myriad things which cross my path day to day. However, I want to get back to basics and really do what I intended when I started here.

I'll also be looking to do more commentary pieces and responding to things I've read on other blogs. So we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks and months as I get back into the swing of a life which (hopefully) won't be dominated entirely by work.

Militarising the internet

2011-06-01T17:04:00.002+01:00

There's been some interesting coverage over the last day or so about the emergence of the Pentagon's "cyber strategy", trying to bring cyber attacks in line with traditional kinetic attacks. This was a pretty inevitable move, considering that the word "cyber" has been bandied about to an almost ridiculous degree in the last few years, but what does it mean?

The most interesting part is that cyber attacks will now be ranked up there with physical attacks, meaning that if you (as a nation state) do some nastiness that impacts upon American infrastructure (e.g. you shut down a power station, aka Stuxnet), you can expect a cruise missile to be visiting you very soon.

The Pentagon is also reportedly producing a list of "cyber weapons" so they can fit these tools into their force architecture. Here's what a senior military source had to say:

“So whether it’s a tank, an M-16 or a computer virus, it’s going to follow the same rules so that we can understand how to employ it, when you can use it, when you can’t, what you can and can’t use,”

This is actually a useful concept, as it codifies when certain tools can be used and who needs to sign off on their use. For the first time meaning that there is an actual structure as to how state based cyber war is carried out.

But therein lies the problem. State based cyber war is already an archaic idea. During the Russia-Georgia conflict in 2008 there was a concerted cyber attack on Georgian websites in order to disrupt information flow. This was of course extremely useful to the Russian state, but it doesnt appear that they in fact ordered it, at least not in the conventional way. Instead nationalist Russian hackers chose to do it themselves.

Its less clear if this is true of the major Chinese hacking organisations. These may be more directly aligned with the state itself, but even that is only a possibility, not a certainty. Certainly the groups appear to operate in ways friendly to the state, but its very hard to make the direct link between that an actual state direction.

The issue is that "cyber" is just too damn easy. The tools are literally anywhere, and can be accessed by anyone. They arent even that hard to use. Take a look, for example, at Backtrack, an entire operating system which exists to facilitate "penetration testing". Its based on Linux, so its relatively easy to use, has a graphical interface, and requires only time to learn how to use it.

Now, that doesnt mean you're going to be a mafiosa cybercriminal if you download this software, but it does show how easy it is to get onto the bottom rung. It only takes tenacity and an inquiring mind to take it to the next level.

The difficulty of trying to militarise and protect the internet is analogous with the difficulties of militarising space. Its actually really easy to do, but you'll screw yourself if you try. If you wanted to deny your enemy access to space (at least to a meaningful degree) you can do it, throw a couple of hundred tons of gravel into orbit and its done. Unfortunately you now can't use space either, so thats a bugger.

The same goes for the internet. You can put up as many walls as you like, but in the end you will do yourself just as much harm as you do your enemy. Consider the upcoming attempts in America to "civilise" the internet using the PROTECTIP act. This tool will fundamentally undermine the architecture of the internet itself, and according to pretty much everyone who knows what they're talking about, it won't work. And thats just civilians.

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding about the tools of cyberwar. They are not weapons, but they can be used as weapons. Less than a decade ago, in the wake of 9/11 the US started banging the drum (again) claiming that encryption was being used as a weapon and as such should be banned from civilian use. This would have severely undermined an unbelievably large number of civilian applications, whilst "bad guys" would just have gone on using encryption tools.

In this new world, where "cyber" is the new cool, its increasingly important to ensure that the internet itself is not militarised and that the desires of those who understand the least, but fear the most, are not brought to the fore. There needs to be a real debate not just on the threat, but on how we can best fit the response into a coherent strategic narrative. Dealing with the distributed threat of cyber attacks requires more than a list of the threats and vague claims that they will be treated the same way as weapons of war.

Book Review: Wasp

2011-05-30T19:03:00.004+01:00

Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell, recently turned up on Kindle and I noticed it in my recommended books, so I thought it was high time to catch up on what I actually think to be an important (if lighthearted) book on the topic of insurgency. Its a work of science fiction, but a very entertaining one. Written in the 1950's it emerged from a time when suspicion and threat of the Soviets were rising, and the second world war was only recent history.

The premise of the book is that the Earth (a pretty clear analogue for the UK during WW2) is besieged on all sides by the hostile Sirian Empire (Aka Germany). Technologically less advanced but far more populous the Sirians will eventually win the war and Earth will be wiped out. Enter the main character Mowry.

Mowry is recruited to be dropped into enemy territory to become, in the words of one of the protagonists, a "wasp". The theory is that a wasp, in the right place, can cause enormous damage as humans flail in panic at it. Occasionally the wasp gets crushed, but more often than not it gets away scot free. Mowry is therefore disguised as a Sirian and dropped off on one of their planets to disrupt the enemy with everything from leafleting campaigns to assassination to bombings.

Its a very clever book, and deals with the idea of insurgency very well. The tactics of the "wasp", the reaction of society at large, all are very true to life. Mowry's slow descent into culture shock and madness as he is increasingly isolated from Earth is very well described.

To me this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. As Mowry continues to struggle to maintain his focus and remember that everyone around him, including people who are his partners in crime (albeit unwittingly) grow to be friends. He knows how foolish this is, but at the same time cannot resist it.

The abject failure of the Sirian Empire to manage to crush the wasp is almost a case study of the difficulties we face in modern times, both at home and abroad in finding threats to our own security. Our massive and disproportionate reaction to threats which are in truth minor is charted in playful detail in Wasp. I dont want to spoil anything for those who might like to read the book so I won't go any further than that.

This charmingly written, entertaining little parable is a story which should be part of the reading list of anyone who is interested in the idea of insurgency or counter insurgency.

Congrats to Mike Maher-King

2011-05-23T22:51:00.002+01:00

This is just a short one to say congratulations to a good friend of mine, who recently spoke at TEDxTokyo about his work with orphans in Japan. He founded an organisation called Smile Kids Japan, which seeks to do outreach to orphans. He's been doing this for quite a while now and deserves every bit of recognition. Take a few minutes to watch the video, its well worth it.

If you want to learn a bit more you can check out the Smile Kids website.

Book Review: Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen

2011-05-22T17:15:00.003+01:00

As regular readers will know I have an abiding fascination with hacking and hackers, both the people and the technology. Good books about hacking are extremely rare however, comprehension of the topic is extremely poor, witness the endless poor debate about cyber warfare. So when I came across Kingpin I was intrigued and I'm glad I made the effort.

Kingpin explores the world of hacking, both legal and illegal, through the life story of "Iceman", a man who skirts both sides of the coin.

It helps that Poulsen is himself a former hacker (I'm always curious as to whether you can be a former hacker, since its primarily dependent on personal interest). He doesn't shy away from technical terminology or do any favours to the reader.

Despite being a highly technical book it doesn't lack for intrigue or pacing. Ultimately this is a fast paced, fascinating exploration of a world which few people have access to. It charts a history which basically doesn't exist anywhere else, the emergence of modern cybercrime.

To me the most interesting sections of the book is the interplay between the law and the criminals. The ultimate lesson is that the law is barely able to cope at any stage with this new field. Criminals are consistently ahead of the law, and it takes a vast amount of resource in order to bring down small numbers of criminals. Time and again tiny mistakes or misunderstandings allow cybercriminals to walk free.

Its strangely hard to empathise with any of the characters in the book, as by and large they are all criminals, but that doesn’t make them any less fascinating. They continue to evolve and adapt to the changing world in which they find themselves page by page.

As governments around the world continue to create aggressive and reactive laws to deal with exactly these sorts of problems it would be wise to take the time to read this book to place the changing world in the correct context. This is a global criminal network, with no centre, only individuals.

An excellently written and elegant narrative of the hacking world, this is a must read for anyone interested in cybercrime, cyberwar or hacking.

A tentative relaunch

2011-05-21T18:04:00.003+01:00

After a significant period of absense I've decided its time to try and get back into the blogging game. A few people have been asking me about my absense of late and I can only blame myself really, I've been working too many hours and not taking enough time to actually sit down and think about things. Happily, in the interim I've not entirely disengaged my brain, so hopefully the transition back into blogging shouldnt be too brutual.

In my absense I've become something of a follower of Thomas P.M. Barnett, someone that pretty much anyone interested in this blog will at least have heard of, so expect a fair bit of commentary around his ideas and where they intersect with my own interests. It actually took me a little while to get used to some of his concepts, but now I'm there. If you havent already seen it, then watch his excellent talk at TED

TED of course remains an unbelievably good source of some fascinating ideas. I'm immensely proud of a friend of mine, Mike, who will be speaking at TEDxJapan (I think thats the one, he's certainly speaking at one of the TED conferences soon). Mike is genuinely one of the most impressive people I know, and did some fantastic work after the earthquake in Japan. Until his speech comes on (I have no idea when that might be) watch this one about online "filter bubbles"

Things continue to be interesting in the Middle East, and the unrest is perhaps even moving into Europe via Spain right now. Regardless, it looks like Bahrain, Syria are still shaky, and Libya remains an enigma. Osama is dead, which is good news considering he has outlived his own movement by about 2-5 years. So thats a good few posts right there.

I should do a review of Kingpin by Kevin Poulson soon, one of the finest books on hacking and the hacking community so far. To be fair, thats not saying much, fiction and scholarship on hacking is woefully inadequate. I recently tried to read Underground by Suelette Dreyfus, I say tried, because it was one of the worst books I've recently tried to grind through. A book about hacking which focusses almost exclusively on inane details about the lives of those it tries to chronicle.

Anonymous will continue to be a part of what I talk about. As the organisation continues to find an identity and a focus for its activities it forms a model for... something.

I want to refocus this blog and renew it. I allowed myself to go down too many blind alleys particularly towards the end of my last run. Thats no bad thing, but I don't want to fill this space up with what amounts to pub chat.

I do want to talk about BitCoin, once I understand it. An emergant online economy it promises to be an interesting experiment if nothing else. If it is successful I see lots of exciting legislation emerging over the next couple of years to make it illegal, failing dramatically, and then who knows. Read about it and see what you think.

So, here we go again. Lets see how it goes. Thanks to those who have encouraged me to get back into this.

Blog on hiatus for now

2011-02-16T22:50:00.002Z

Due to insane working hours and a general inability to find the time and space to think about stuff to write I'm going to have to quieten the blog down for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to regular posting within a week or two.

Seriously? A submarine?

2011-02-15T07:29:00.002Z

I couldnt help but be fascinated by this story:

Members of the Colombian Navy stand guard on top of a seized submarine built by drug smugglers in a makeshift shipyard in Timbiqui, department of Cauca, February 14, 2011. Colombian authorities said the submersible craft was to be used to transport 8 tons of cocaine illegally into Mexico.

This is awesome and slightly terrifying on pretty much every level. Its not clear from the article if this is a home made job, or some piece of left over equiptment from some war or another.

I can only ask, what the heck is going on that these guys can run a submarine to transport drugs. Isnt that one of those "Nation state" style toys?

Egypt: A case study in moral weakness

2011-02-12T20:04:00.002Z

I've spoken before on this blog about the importance of being able to assert a moral position, contrasted against the prevaling short term pragmatism which pervades political decision making. Its something I've been dwelling on a lot recently as I've watched the seemingly relentless political vascillation which it seems has pervaded many Western democracies over Egypt.

It seems ironic that after we have fought two wars to instill democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan (to extremely limited success) we are so reluctant to embrace the possibility of democracy in this state. It is a clear recognition that realpolitik ultimately trumps the ideological goal of broadening democracy. President Obama once said this in GrantPark after winning the election:

To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

He would later go on to speak in Egypt, saying this:

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

Both of these are clearly stated moral positions, and it is not hard to imagine that the second speech in particular might have had some impact on the Egyptian people's position on democracy. They wanted a Government which reflected their will, so where was Obama and his Government?

Vice President Biden described Mubarak as "an ally" declaring:

Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with Israel, and I think that it would be – I would not refer to him as a dictator.

Claiming Mubarak wasnt a dictator is basically saying you don't agree with what the definition of what a dictator is. He was a dictator, thats a simple fact. He was also an ally. One does not preclude the other, but denying one because you like the other is a little bit daft.

Obama, a man who let us remember earned himself a Nobel Peace prize about 5 minutes after taking office, called on Mubarak to take "concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people." Would it have killed him to suggest that just maybe it might be a good idea for Egypt to have a real election? Apparently so.

Moral weakness is a peril which few leaders recognise. Most people believe that certain things are right, and others wrong. Usually they make this decision swiftly and once decision is made it is hard to alter their perception. In Egypt I think most people felt that the protesters were broadly in the right. There was some early fear that the protests were some sort of jihadi uprising, but that quickly settled down when it became clear the protests were largely peaceful.

Cameron and Obama struggled to assert a clear position on Egypt because they were trying too hard to see what the benefit of supporting either side was, without recognising that it would have been more positive to embrace the movement, garnering both domestic support, but more importantly have showed that he wanted something positive for the people of Egypt and the region more broadly.

I realise that my position on issues like this is idealised, entirely too much so, but I honestly believe that finding true moral position on some issues would genuinely be a fine thing for our leaders.

On doctrine

2011-02-08T22:44:00.002Z

The discovery of the highly entertaining “Doctrine Man” (hat tip to Starbuck of Wings Over Iraq fame) and my reading of First to Fight by Victor Krulak has put me in a contemplative frame of mind regarding the issue of doctrine. As I, an admittedly non military man, understand it, doctrine is an attempt to codify learning and create a method of dealing with a set of circumstances. Although in the modern age this mechanism may be overused, conceptually it is interesting.

My personal interest stems from my profound irritation with the idea that certain skills and abilities are rooted in some god given and indefinable talent. Ultimately it seems crazy to me to claim that any ability is utterly beyond another human being. We all have our specific aptitudes, and weaknesses, which have to be addressed and factored in, but these are only part of the overall picture of competence.

Consider checklists, checklists have been used to save thousands of lives the world over in medical procedures in particular. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (eminently readable and highly recommended) is a great set of case studies in how this simple mechanism can be applied to any field to great effect. Is this so colossally different to doctrine? Perhaps those better versed in the topic of military doctrine will tell me otherwise, but it seems the answer is ‘probably not’.

Yet the business world seems almost profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that we should embrace and codify knowledge. At best, great ideas are passed on through training, and people half heartedly sit through a session, trying to muster enough interest and wondering how many pastries are reasonable to eat. All too often the ubiquitous ‘case study’ fills the void.

The case study is probably the tool which misses the point with greatest style. Rather than trying to assess at the strategic level how a set of circumstances can be dealt with in a competent way, people are exposed to the lowest operation level and told that’s where they should go for answers.

So what is the solution?

There is a real case to be made to bring the same scholarship which is seen in the military at its best, codifying and improving knowledge ready to be deployed and applying it to business. Part of the reason I write this blog is to try and keep my thoughts in a single place, although I do, on occasion, try to write longer, more developed ideas.

I wonder if the instant communication age is somewhat to blame. In a world of powerpoint slides (I’m sure military readers will feel my pain here), emails and IMs it is all too easy to forget that developed thought has its place too. Creating a direction for action to be broadly followed under a certain set of circumstances would be no bad thing.

To put it in context, one abiding frustration of mine is that most companies really struggle to get to grips with new business. A brief comes in, you’re expected to respond to it. Who should be writing that response? What tools should you offer the potential client? Are their vendors you need to speak to? If there was a doctrine, the process would become profoundly easier.

I realise this is a rant, and I’m still trying to figure out how this would actually work, but I feel like theres something there. How do we take the best of the concept of doctrine, without losing the freedom to act?

Book Review: Brute

2011-02-07T21:45:00.003Z

The first of my birthday book selection to be read was Brute, The Life of Victor Krulak. Its a little odd that I read the biography before I read his own book First to Fight, but I've enjoyed Coram's writing style before and I wanted to give this book a good read.

Its a difficult one, Victor "Brute" Krulak is undeniably as interesting a character as Boyd (although his ideas were not as revolutionary outside of the USMC), he is in some ways less likable. For all that though the story of his life is extremely engaging and a fascinating study of how the Marine Corp has evolved since the Second World War, seen through the lens of one key figure's life.

The USMC is a particularly fascinating institution, always being driven to do more with less, it has evolved into an extremely effective and impressive institution. The fact it has remained under attack even in peacetime due to interservice rivalries, coming mostly from the Army, there is almost a sense of paranoia which comes across in this text quite palpably.

The spirit of the USMC, the "first to fight" attitude is also written large in every page, and although that is excellent and laudable, it means the book is a little too keen to champion the Corps, without focussing on the life of the protagonist.

The other slight problem, which the author notes, is that Krulak was often willing to twist, embellish or indeed plain make things up. Although we're all guilty of that from time to time, even Coram is forced to admit upon occasion that this might mean certain aspects of the book should be considered suspect. I dont for a minute believe that Coram didnt do his due diligence however, and I wouldnt say this overly detracts from the book.

I'm not sure I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed Boyd. Its a perfectly good read, but there is a strange sense of a lack of direction, as if the book doesnt know quite what it wants to be and do. Thats a shame, because there is a great story here, which occasionally gets lost in the details. Maybe thats just me being fussy though.

Overall, this is an engaging and enjoyable study of a fascinating and largely unrecognised character in US military history. I would thoroughly recomend taking the time to read it.

Some thoughts on Egypt

2011-02-05T18:35:00.004Z

I've been glued to Al Jazeera's live feed this week, its been incredible television, and I've found myself musing on it a great deal. I'm genuinely angry about that fact that puny and unworthy Western leaders are not able to embrace the fact that Egypt and other states in the region are, for the first time, begging for real democracy. My family has lost friends in the two wars which we are still fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which we primarily fought, it seems, to instill democracy.

These people want the democracy we've been unable to force on other states, and yet our leaders stand back, our media barely informs, and our public couldn't care less. But there you go.

Charles Cameron at ZenPundit has referenced a point which has been on my mind for a few days, jihadi's have gained no traction in Egypt and thats got to be a good thing. Here's a quote he's used, which appeared on ISCR:

A large group of the ones organizing them yesterday were people in galabeyas and long beards shouting "Al Jihad fe Sabeel Allah (Jihad in the name of Allah), you have to continue fighting, we will win this war, if you die here today, you will be a martyr and go straight to heaven, don't stop, fight, fight, fight".
NO! This is NOT why we werein the streets on Friday being tear gassed and dodging rubber bullets and it is not why we have been going to Tahrir everyday to be heard. The reason why this revolt went through and became successful was because it was not religiously or politically charged. Don't let the ones who have been watching this unfold in the shadows ride this wave and hijack what you have been fighting for. I saw on Monday Taalat El Sadat (a dodgy fame hungry politician) ask people in the square to get aggressive. He was met with one loud message by everyone, "Selmeya, Selmeya" (Peaceful, Peaceful) - which is how all of us want it.

Here's an image which I think summed up the emotion in Egypt for me:

According to The Atlantic, where this picture appeared (it was sourced from here):

A soldier of the Egyptian Army cries in front of one of the demonstrators after they were attacked by thugs. He cries because he was unable to protect them.

These beautiful, peaceful protests have caused me a lot of emotion this week, and no picture has hit me harder than this one.

The fact that jihadi violence hasnt polluted this movement is something which we should all feel blessed about. Its an incredibly positive sign. It shows that the power of the jihadi movement is waning, at least in Egypt, and (we can all hope) is not able to regain its momentum and sieze control of the situation. Certainly that doesnt seem to be what the protesters want. Every time I turn on Al Jazeera English I hear the cries of "Selmeya" from the crowd.

I'm afraid I dont have any great or worthy thoughts on this topic, its enormously, almost strangely emotional for me. I only hope that the next few days will bring on the first parts of a new dawn in the region.

Did Google just develop a foreign policy?

2011-02-01T11:31:00.002Z

Some really interesting stuff about Google and Twitter working together to get around the internet takedown in Egypt. Its a pretty novel service:

Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.
The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, ~~uses Google's speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate~~ provides an online voicemail service and tweets a link to each message, which is sent out on Twitter with the "#egypt" hashtag.

Its a pretty gutsy move. They're going head to head with an established Government which right now, isnt going anywhere, so why would they do it? Theres obviously some great PR here, its gotten loads of press, and ultimately its the right thing to do.

I wonder if its something more carefully thought out however. Google's business model (and Twitter's) does well in democracies and struggles in dictatorships for obvious reasons. The Google experience in China being the best example. Would it be beyond the company to decide that they want to start promoting the types of Government they want as part of their long term business strategy? I honestly don't see why not, its only lobbying on steroids, and they do plenty of lobbying.

Plenty of other companies already do it, why shouldnt Google?

Book review: Brown at 10

2011-01-31T22:40:00.003Z

After the distinct averageness of Mandelson's book, and the painfully unreadable nature of Blair's I couldnt bring myself to get Brown's particular rewriting of history. Instead I decided to try something a bit different, so I picked out Anthony Seldon's Brown at 10. This is really the first serious attempt at a history of Brown's premiership.

I actually wasn't dissapointed.

Love him or loathe him, Brown was Prime Minister of this country and I think its hard to imagine that he wasnt doing the best job he was capable of. Seldon and Lodge do fine service to a man whose place in history is liable to be uncomfortable at best.

He is everything you expect him to be, angry, difficult and profoundly unable to grasp the nettle that is policy making. He failed to build a team around him, failed to inspire those who would stick with him, and generally wasn't what we (the people) wanted or felt we deserved.

However there is an unexpected and interesting side of him which didnt make it into the UK press, Brown the statesman, a man who could broker deals on the international stage without flinching and who almost never backed down. The narrative was so set against him that there was no interest in telling this story, so its good to see someone writing this fuller version of events.

In many ways this tale is a tragedy, someone who could have been a profoundly gifted statesman who was never quite able to get ahold of what he wanted to achieve. Without knowing this he was unable to create the country he had envisaged for so long. Surrounding himself with toxic people blocked him off from the positive influences which might have made the difference.

The most important thing about this book is that Seldon and Lodge don't just tell a series of events, they tell a story, and they tell it well. Exploring Brown's life couldnt have been an easy proposition, so many people have made their minds up. It is the mark of a good writer to look beyond the existing narrative and build your own, and that is exactly what has been done here.

I would highly recommend this book to any student of contemporary history, I'd also suggest it to anyone who has made their mind up about Gordon Brown. I certainly had, but this made me reconsider some of the things which I had taken for granted, or at least put them in a new light. I dont think Brown is any better a man, but I can certainly reconsider some aspects of his personality and try to put him into his proper context.

Egypt just left the modern world

2011-01-28T04:52:00.003Z

My blog is a pathetically inadequate place to be reporting this but at the time of writing it doesnt seem like much of the media other than the Huffington Post is interested in talking about this. Hopefully that'll change during the day.

The Egyptian Government has taken a step which has never before been seen, they have taken the country off the internet. That might seem like hyperbole but it seems to literally have happened.

This from the Rensys blog:

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world.

For those who don't think this significant, citing routine internet disruption in Iran and Tunisia please keep this in mind, also from Rensys:

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Alongside this it appears that mobile phone signals are also being disrupted in an effort to prevent protestors unifying their efforts.

Today, Egyptians will rise to pray, then they will take to the streets. They will be shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, gassed and there will be deaths. We should keep in mind what they are fighting for, a more fair and just society, free of the rule of a tyrant who has ruled the country for too long with barely a nod to democracy and who has now, in a desperate attempt to cling to power cut his nation off from the tool which has pretty much defined the age we live in.

Quotes, quotes, quotes

2011-01-26T22:26:00.002Z

Good quotations are hard to find, but oh so useful. Hence when I found this document accidentally (I literally don't know where I picked it up, I just discovered I'd opened it in a tab on my browser) I was rather pleased. Its a selection of quotes from military sources and scholars, here are a few of my favourites:

Never interrupt your opponent while he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address

There is only so much stupidity one man can prevent.
Attributed to Andy Marshall, Director of Net Assessment

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Thomas Payne, The American Crisis, 1776

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana

I'm sure a few of these will be turning up in future presentations.

John Boehner on the way up

2011-01-25T20:17:00.002Z

Although I follow the UK Conservative Home site I've not made it my business to regularly check in on the US flavour. One of the things I like about ConHomeUK is the tracking perceptions of the cabinet and other key individuals and organisations. This has been going on for some time and has grown to be pretty statistically robust, it is certainly a useful tracker of general trends. Its good to see they're following this model in the USA.

Theres a good set of data up on key players (and movements) amongst Conservatives there which shows that, unsurprisingly, John Beohner is doing rather well at the moment:

Conservatives not only strongly believe that Republicans will maintain control of the House of Representatives in 2012, they also rewarded Boehner's "month of tears and transparency" with a higher approval rating.
With 80% of voters giving him a thumbs-up this month, he passed Sarah Palin as the most highly-approved individual on the list presented to respondents. Only Fox News and the Tea Party get higher marks.
In particular:

While respondents are less confident today than last month that the White House and Senate will be in Republican hands after 2012, they remain highly confident that the GOP will continue to hold the House.
2012 hopefuls Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee either remained steady or dropped in their approval ratings from last month, but Boehner's rating rose from 71% to 80%.
Boehner's not the only congressional leader to have had a good month. Mitch McConnell's public leadership at the start of the 112th Congress has also rewarded him with an approval bounce from 44% to 53%.

Also, I note that Chris Christine has crept up in approval, from 74% to 77%. Just saying...

Creative use of names

2011-01-25T20:10:00.004Z

A really smart little project here by a couple of guys (names on the site), who have used publically avaliable data to map, ward by ward, the most common surnames. London Names therefore becomes a map of the most common ethnic communities in each area.

Its a really fascinating study, and well worth taking a look at, there are a few surprises in there.

There's also the equally smart World Names, which tracks surnames globally. Apparently my name is popular in Australia, North America and some of Western Europe. What a shocker.

Update, and interesting internet things

2011-01-24T11:18:00.002Z

Apologies all for a few days of downtime. Lots on at the moment, both work and personal. This week is likely to be equally disrupted as its my birthday, and I've got an ungodly amount of travel to do. However I will be trying to check in with interesting things I find around the internet.

First up is this crazy article about an online shop for admin rights to a series of US Government and Military websites:

Amid all of the media and public fascination with threats like Stuxnet and weighty terms such as “cyberwar,” it’s easy to overlook the more humdrum and persistent security threats, such as Web site vulnerabilities. But none of these distractions should excuse U.S. military leaders from making sure their Web sites aren’t trivially hackable by script kiddies.
Security vendor Imperva today blogged about a hacker who claims to have access to and control over several top dot-gov, dot-mil and dot-edu Web sites. I’ve seen some of the back-end evidence of his hacks, so it doesn’t seem like he’s making this up. Perhaps out of deference to the federal government, the Imperva folks blocked out the best part of that screen shot — the actual names of the Web site domains that this hacker is selling. For example, the hacker is advertising full control and root access to cecom.army.mil, a site whose stated purpose is “to develop, acquire, provide and sustain world-class…systems and Battle Command capabilities for the joint warfighter.” It can be yours, for just $499 (sorry, no credit cards accepted; only the virtual currency Liberty Reserve).

Scary stuff, and proof that for all the froth around cyber-(insert scary word here), the reality is that the military and Government are flailing wildly in an environment they don't understand and can't control.

Less cyber please

2011-01-19T21:57:00.005Z

It seems like I can't open a paper or look at a news website without seeing the word "cyber" usually followed by "crime" or "attacks" or "security" or "war" stuck on the end. Here are some recent examples:

The Guardian - London 2012 Olympics faces increased cyber attack threat

London Olympics organisers today warned of the increased danger of cyber attacks that could fatally undermine the technical network that supports everything from recording world records to relaying results to commentators.
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) said it was "inevitable" that its systems would have to repel malicious attempts by hackers to bring them down.

My reaction: Bring as much of the system as possible off the internet, create a secure internal network to process the data in house.

Daily Telegraph - Cyber-attacks could cause global 'catastrophe'

A succession of multiple cyber-attacks could "become a full-scale global shock" on a par with a pandemic and the collapse of the world financial system, the report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said.

Contingency plans to recover systems should be put in place and cybersecurity policies should "encompass the needs of all citizens and not just central government facilities", the report said.

Say what?!: Erm, this doesnt really need a solution. If hackers can do the same damage as a pandemic we're in "game over" territory. This story reads like the plot of a bad piece of science fiction. I can only hope that it is a severe misrepresentation of the OECD report in order to create a more exciting story. Worth noting that the BBC headline for this was "Risks of cyber war 'over-hyped' says OECD study," ironically, pretty much every other media source over-hyped it. Of course they also said...

BBC - 'Cyber war will hit all web users'

The conflict between Wikileaks supporters and the companies withdrawing their services from the whistle-blowing website has been dubbed a "cyber war".

Activists have targeted firms such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa for their opposition to the site's publication of thousands of secret US diplomatic messages.

But there are fears the online battle could lead to everyday internet use becoming much more heavily regulated.

Say guy, learn the terminology and history: First off, every user of the internet? Thats over 1.5 billion people. Thats a lot. According to this piece there have been no DDOS attacks before now which have been done by anyone other than criminals. Of course DDOS is a crime according to most people, so thats somewhat moot as a point. Honestly, there isnt a single line in the entire piece that makes technical or factual sense. Watch the video, its hilarious if you know the first thing about the issue.

I don't fancy writing up any more because it would take too long, but I do want to revisit an article from some time ago in the New Yorker, hat tip to John Robb for the find.

New Yorker - The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war?

American intelligence and security officials for the most part agree that the Chinese military, or, for that matter, an independent hacker, is theoretically capable of creating a degree of chaos inside America. But I was told by military, technical, and intelligence experts that these fears have been exaggerated, and are based on a fundamental confusion between cyber espionage and cyber war. Cyber espionage is the science of covertly capturing e-mail traffic, text messages, other electronic communications, and corporate data for the purpose of gathering national-security or commercial intelligence. Cyber war involves the penetration of foreign networks for the purpose of disrupting or dismantling those networks, and making them inoperable. (Some of those I spoke to made the point that China had demonstrated its mastery of cyber espionage in the EP-3E incident, but it did not make overt use of it to wage cyber war.) Blurring the distinction between cyber war and cyber espionage has been profitable for defense contractors—and dispiriting for privacy advocates. [Author's emphasis]

The froth in the papers and news sources about cyber-(insert scary word here) are part of this willful exaggeration of the threat. For those who have watched Die Hard 4, such a situation is nigh on impossible. An event like that would fall into the category of a full blown singularity, an event so momentous that everything after that point would be the result of that single event. This is not something that will happen in the real world.

Even taking a simple civilian website off the internet is hard. It requires a botnet (either voluntary, e.g. Anonymous, or involuntary e.g. Storm) to be deployed at the expense of time and significant effort and for that effort to be sustained over time. The solutions to the problem of this type of attack are manifold and simple and most sites so affected are up and running in hours as if nothing had happened.

So, scale that up to a military network, which is (or should be) prepared for such an attack, do we really think that there are any real players out there who can aggressively take down and dismantle such networks to the extent they cannot be rebuilt and used again after a period of repair?

The most sophisticated cyber attack (known) to have occured is most likely Stuxnet, which did actually succeed in damaging physical infrastructure. But even that incredibly complex and ingenious tool did not stop the Iranian nuclear program, nor did it do damage which could not in time be repaired. Its also worth noting that, contrary to Sky news report s, this was a one shot tool. The vulnerabilities in the operating system have been patched, and cannot now be used to perpetrate similar attacks.

Here's what I see when I read these sorts of articles:

For those unfamiliar with the story of the blind men and the elephant take a look here. In essence it speaks to the fact that without the ability to see the whole of the thing, it is possible to interpret the thing as being an impossible array of things it is not. Thus is the media with the concept of cyber-(insert scary term).

There are some really good opportunities amongst the froth to teach people about the real problems. How their computers can be hijacked by criminals to form part of a botnet for example. Or how prolific internet fraud is. What phishing is. If more people were aware of these very real and very difficult problems then the lives of criminals who exploit the public's general lack of knowledge over the topic would have a much more trying time exploiting these weaknesses for their own gain.

Here's something to consider, from Batman - The Dark Knight

There are people in the real world, who, like the Joker in Batman, want to burn the world down just for the sake of it. But these people are painfully few and far between and almost universally lack the skills to undertake their task.

Who would want to perpetrate a cyber attack as deadly as a pandemic? No one but a madman. It would serve no military purpose, no civil purpose, at best it would be a supreme act of terrorism. But such a devastating event would reprecussions the perpretrator could never envisage, and which would, most likely, turn on them.

As a society we need to start getting a grip on our ability and desire to panic over existential threats to our existance. They never measure up to our expectations, and whilst we look skyward to see if the sun is about to go out, or the moon come crashing down, we miss the fact that there are real problems.

I'd also implore those in the media to take a step back and consider the whole elephant once in a while, as the writers in the New Yorker did in their excellent article.

Helping the homeless

2011-01-18T23:39:00.002Z

A bit off topic tonight, but Ed Staite has a good piece up on homelessness, an issue which I spent a good deal of time working on when I was a lowly Parliamentary Researcher (oh what heady times). Coming off the back of a recent article in The Evening Standard he makes the bold move of flying in the face of the accepted wisdom that providing meals and support to long homeless people is a good thing:

I don't doubt the intentions of these charities - indeed they have probably kept some poor souls alive - but isn't it time there was acknowledgement that long term these methods may be flawed; there could be a better way to spend the money that will get people off our streets for good.

Many of the charities work exceptionally hard, but ultimately they're dealing with a symptom. Of course this is not by any stretch of the imagination a criticism, their role is to deal with the symptoms, but there needs to be someone dealing with the causes.

I know Boris Johnson has invested substantial amounts in schemes to prevent the homeless spending more than one night on the street. It's a long-term approach to solving the problem. To me it's the right approach, but I wonder what the liberal left volunteering in the soup kitchens will think?

For the record Ed (and I say this with a smile) some of us right wingers occasionally volunteer too, although I havent for quite some time.

Back on topic, the problem is that no one has come up with a way of curing the problem, and its deeply intractable. The reasons people become homeless are deeply chaotic, and causes can start to pile up years before the actual thing which drives someone wholly onto the street. Given that, creating homelessness policy which goes to the causes is very difficult, although solid and effective programs dealing with drug and alcohol addiction in particular can help.

What does help, and Ed correctly points it out, are policies which deal with people the moment they hit the street. If you can scoop them up early, identify the problems they are having, and get them into a position where help is avaliable to them, you can make a start. Not all of them will take it, but eventually they will, and then you can begin the process of bringing people back into society.

He also hints at a problem which I think is very unfortunate, the media often get involved in a homelessness story only if it comes from a homelessness charity, its rare to see in depth articles on good intiatives being run by Government (at any level). This means that when you do see an article about homelessness, its someone's PR, and PR amounts to advertising. Scan down to find who the person quoted is and you'll be seeing who it was that wrote the press release.

Its an unfortunate situation, but speaks to the fact that we, as a society, find it easier to talk about homelessness than we do in dealing with it.

The AIs have already won

2011-01-17T19:46:00.004Z

Lots of things I want to write about at the moment but none of them are working right in my head, so I wanted to draw attention to this excellent piece on Wired. It speaks to the fact that a vast amount of the trading done on the stock market (and every associated market it seems) is done by sophisticated artificial intelligences:

Over the past decade, algorithmic trading has overtaken the industry. From the single desk of a startup hedge fund to the gilded halls of Goldman Sachs, computer code is now responsible for most of the activity on Wall Street. (By some estimates, computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume.) Increasingly, the market’s ups and downs are determined not by traders competing to see who has the best information or sharpest business mind but by algorithms feverishly scanning for faint signals of potential profit.
Algorithms have become so ingrained in our financial system that the markets could not operate without them. At the most basic level, computers help prospective buyers and sellers of stocks find one another—without the bother of screaming middlemen or their commissions. High-frequency traders, sometimes called flash traders, buy and sell thousands of shares every second, executing deals so quickly, and on such a massive scale, that they can win or lose a fortune if the price of a stock fluctuates by even a few cents. Other algorithms are slower but more sophisticated, analyzing earning statements, stock performance, and newsfeeds to find attractive investments that others may have missed. The result is a system that is more efficient, faster, and smarter than any human.

Of course theres an issue here, by handing over huge chunks of the market to computers we have lost control of how it actually works and thus it has become unpredicted and unpredictable:

At its worst, it is an inscrutable and uncontrollable feedback loop. Individually, these algorithms may be easy to control but when they interact they can create unexpected behaviors—a conversation that can overwhelm the system it was built to navigate. On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average inexplicably experienced a series of drops that came to be known as the flash crash, at one point shedding some 573 points in five minutes. Less than five months later, Progress Energy, a North Carolina utility, watched helplessly as its share price fell 90 percent. Also in late September, Apple shares dropped nearly 4 percent in just 30 seconds, before recovering a few minutes later.
These sudden drops are now routine, and it’s often impossible to determine what caused them. But most observers pin the blame on the legions of powerful, superfast trading algorithms—simple instructions that interact to create a market that is incomprehensible to the human mind and impossible to predict.

It certainly puts bankers bonuses into persepective.

A Diamond performance

2011-01-16T18:30:00.002Z

For those of you unfamiliar with Bob Diamond he is the incoming Chief Executive of Barclays, and current head of Barclays Corporate & Investment Banking and Wealth Management. Diamond was recently interviewed by the Treasury Select Committee as part of an inquiry into "Competition and Choice. Here's what happened:

For those of you too lazy and unmotivated to watch more than 2 hours of Select Committee investigation (shame on you!), here's a summary, he absolutely owned the room. He was cool, collected and never fluffed his lines. For a slightly more adult analysis Robert Peston is the place to go, he described the whole experience as "gripping theatre", which is entirely fair in my opinion.

I've watched plenty of these 'inquiries' and most of the time the guy being inquired upon is significantly less able. There's usually a wobble no matter how skilled the performer, or an ill considered "ah-hah" moment when they agree with an MP's point.

After watching this video I felt the need to try and codify what it is that stands out about Diamond's performance, in order to get a sense of what we can all learn:

Don't Panic: Its silly to have to say it, but its true. All too often subjects in these settings get asked a question they dont like the sound of, or lose their thread, or simply lose the plot and they panic. Diamond never once suggests that he's intimidated or even impressed by his interrogators, I'm sure he even takes a breath before he answers some of the questions, giving himself the space he needs to stay calm and in control
Don't answer a speech: All too often MPs (and comparable public figures) use their question time to give a speech, adding a question mark to the end and pretending as if its a good use of everyone's time. Diamond deals with these skillfully, without being rude, he steps back from the speech, picks the line to take which fits closest to something approaching the point and delivers it.
Yes and no are never the right answer: At one point Diamond is asked if he is "grateful" to the British taxpayer for their help ensuring the Barclays is protected from the worst of the economic crisis. He refuses to answer with a yes or no, and instead says he is grateful to everyone who has helped. The problem with yes/no questions is they are setups for newspaper articles, this one would have been "Diamond 'grateful' to British taxpayers". By refusing to simplify the issue you avoid letting anyone else simplify it on your behalf later on.
Don't apologise (if you didnt do anything wrong): This only works if you're actually not a bad person. If you're not, go wild. Diamond can reasonably claim not to be a bad guy, his bank didnt take a bailout, and there's no public ownership, so he's largely in the clear on that count. Barclays (like all banks when you get down to it) has done some bad things in the past, but Diamond isnt responsible for them, so when an MP lists off every bad thing (real or imagined) that Barclays has done Diamond doesnt miss a beat, he takes a breath, points out these are accusations not facts, and asks if there's a question. Thats class.
Be right, and get someone else to be right with you: Theres no formula for this, you've got to have every bit of data relevant in any way in your head and be ready to deploy it at a moment's notice. Diamond also brough along Anthony Jenkins, head of Barclays retail, as his wing man. Although Anthony only answers a couple of questions, its clear he is there as a memory backup.

As a friend of mine commented a couple of nights ago, bankers are now hated more than lawyers. I think there's a case to be made that some of this ill feeling is deserved, but much of it isnt. For Diamond to stand up in such an environment and defend his bank and his staff so aggressively speaks to a level of confidence and control which few people have. Its an impressive bit of work, and well worth learning from.

The Campaign I want

2011-01-14T09:47:00.003Z

Hat tip to James at CWR for finding this fascinating bit of polling that shows in a head to head battle, my two favourite US politicians Cory Booker and Chris Christine would be neck and neck from the outset. Booker in particular I could see going a lot further in politics, and its interesting to note that there's some buzz around the idea:

Although much of the focus on Christie's political future has been on a Presidential bid he's a long way from being able to take even a second term as Governor of New Jersey for granted, particularly if Newark Mayor Cory Booker were to challenge him two years from now. Booker is remarkably popular across the state with 46% of voters viewing him favorably to only 16% with a negative opinion. The number of politicians in the country with nearly 3:1 favorability ratings these days is pretty short.

What's most striking within the figures on Booker is how well liked he is across party lines. Although he is unsurprisingly most popular with Democrats at a 51/12 favorability, he also has a 47/17 spread with independents, and even a 36/21 with Republicans. There just aren't very many Democrats who Republicans like right now, especially in a state as polarized as New Jersey.

In a hypothetical contest between Booker and Christie the two tie at 42% each. Those numbers are actually misleadingly good for Christie though. 21% of Democrats are undecided in such a match up while only 7% of Republicans are. That's probably a reflection of 38% of voters in the state still not having an opinion about Booker. More likely than not most of those undecided Democrats would end up in Booker's camp if this match up ever did become a reality.

Christie has never worked hard to be popular, instead focussing on making hard choices for the longer term (what a weird politician he is), something which has earned him a lot of praise and done a lot to improve New Jersey's fortunes.

Booker is the consumate campaigner, and sees opportunities pretty much everywhere it seems. I wrote up the other day about his reaction to the extreme snow in Newark (where he is Mayor), so its hardly surprising he's polling well and cutting across the party divide.

This is one of those "watch this space" scenarios, and one I'll be returning to in the future.

Sensitivity in banking

2011-01-10T22:36:00.002Z

James at The Campaign War Room has a piece up today on the need for bankers to show some sensitivity as the Government turns its eye towards bankers bonuses.

The financial sector has consistently struggled to understand the levels of public and political hostility towards it, and has therefore never developed the right tone in its communications, or developed the right short-term policies to keep the public and politicians onside. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the bankers' bonus row, the fact is their actions and their tone in the downturn risk further alienating people. And if a campaign starts - backed by senior politicians and the popular media - for action to be taken against the banks, the Government is bound to listen.

Its a fair point. The banking and financial sector has been at times aggressive, surly and defensive, sometimes all at once and there is a need for the sector to take a step back and accept that whether they believe its fair or not, the public don't like them and thats the way things are going to be for a good long time. Of course, the pragmatic reasons for doing this are clear:

If the financial sector shows some sensitivity in the short term - until the worst of the cuts are over and the economy starts recovering properly - the worst of their problems will pass. While the industry may need structural reform - something the forthcoming banking commission will deal with - they have a serious short-term PR problem which they need to pay attention to.

The "why us?" complex is not unique to the banking industry. Many large companies, particularly those at the tops of their industry struggle to accept or rationalise public dislike. It's a particularly British bit of double think that we can use a service/store/misc all the time, yet wax lyrical about how much we hate it. Somehow we're able to rationalise this and life proceeds quite comfortably.

We're a strange people sometimes.

Meme of the month: #cosmoCOIN

2011-01-09T11:42:00.002Z

I'm not quite sure how it started, but on Friday a bunch of the military/strategy crowd on Twitter decided to pile in on the #cosmoCOIN meme. The premise was simple, how would Cosmo explain counterinsurgency in headlines?

Some hilarious ones made it in, from all sorts of smart and witty people. In many ways it was a great way of finding people who I should be following and I've picked up a couple of new people who have interesting views along the way.

I really recommend you check in with this article on The Atlantic Wire which has a few of the better entries (although not all of them, nor in my opinion the very best), your truly even got a couple of entries which I'm pleased with.

I really recommend you take a sec to check out the feed. Some hilarious stuff in there which has to be seen to be believed.

Guys who get the interwebs: #1 Evgeny Morozov

2011-01-09T11:04:00.002Z

I was going to fold one of these articles into a wider roundup of recent reading, but a friend of mine sent me a second article by Evgeny Morozov and I felt they deserved their own post. Morozov is, for reference, a visiting scholar at Stanford and one of the better writers on the internet and its impact on the political and security spheres, both domestically and internationally. I'd thoroughly recommend his twitter feed for those who want to keep abreast of this kind of material.

First up is Freedom.gov, a piece which recently appeared in Foreign Policy. It details the dramatic failure of the Obama administration's attempts to use the internet as a tool for improving freedom overseas. Personally I have to take any US claims that the internet should be a tool for freedom with a pinch of salt, considering their wildly overdramatic reaction to Wikileaks.

Morozov posits an interesting argument, that by so blatantly pointing to the fact the US is going to use the internet as a tool to undermine opressive foreign Governments they have essentially given the game away, encouraging those Governments to take aggressive steps to limit their population's ability to access the internet as a resource:

Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don't talk about promoting Internet freedom. Her Newseum speech was full of analogies to the Berlin Wall and praise for Twitter revolutions -- vocabulary straight out of the Bush handbook. To governments already nervous about a wired citizenry, this sounded less like freedom of the Internet than freedom via the Internet: not just a call for free speech online, but a bid to overthrow them by way of cyberspace.

...

Where the bureaucrats and diplomats who touted the Internet Freedom Agenda went wrong was in thinking that Washington could work with Silicon Valley without people thinking that Silicon Valley was a tool of Washington. They bought into the technologists' view of the Internet as an unbridled, limitless space that connects people without regard to borders or physical constraints. At its best, that remains true, but not when governments get involved.

Like the printing press, newspapers and every other tool which made public debate easier the internet has helped to ensure that ideas and discussions flow more freely and closer to the public, bringing more people on board. As with printing presses and newspapers public access to the internet will be restricted if governments see it as a threat to their power. By politicising the platforms like Twitter and Facebook they become percieved parts of the American foreign policy arsenal.

A Russophile friend of mine sent me this second article seperately. Morozov analyses the shift in Russia from direct censorship online to using the toolkits which hackers, and online activists like Anonymous, have been using for quite some time to push sites off the internet and limit access by the general public to these resources.

Hours before the judge in the latest Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial announced yet another guilty verdict last week, Russia's most prominent political prisoner was already being attacked in cyberspace.

No, Khodorkovsky's Web site, the main source of news about the trial for many Russians, was not being censored. Rather, it had been targeted by so-called denial-of-service attacks, with most of the site's visitors receiving a "page cannot be found" message in their browsers.

The interesting thing is that the Russian state itself doesnt really have to take an active part in these attacks.

Under the Russian model - what I refer to as "social control" - no formal, direct censorship is necessary. Armies of pro-government netizens - which often include freelancing amateurs and computer-savvy members of pro-Kremlin youth movements - take matters into their own hands and attack Web sites they don't like, making them inaccessible even to users in countries that practice no Internet censorship at all.

Its a simple and elegant solution that allows the Kremlin to avoid the negative publicity of having aggressive policies of limitation to what people can see online, whilst also preventing not only their own citizens but also foreign readers from accessing material which is considered objectionable. Its also decentralised, so no edicts have to be put out, and the Kremlin doesnt have to monitor the internet for things which offends them.

The Kremlin in fact practices very little formal Internet censorship, preferring social control to technological constraints. There is a certain logic to this. Outright censorship hurts its image abroad: Cyberattacks are too ambiguous to make it into most foreign journalists' reports about Russia's worsening media climate. By allowing Kremlin-friendly companies and vigilantes to police the digital commons, the government doesn't have to fret over every critical blog post.

These two articles are interesting in how they dovetail togeather. The world's supposedly most tech savvy nation is failing dramatically to use the internet to promote its agenda overseas through clumsy ineptitude, whilst the Kremin has figured out a PR friendly way to suppress significant amounts of content online.

The lesson really is that the internet is a chaotic space, and to achieve your foreign policy goals in this space you have to embrace the way the internet works at the moment, not try to impose a new order upon it. The Kremlin has taken on board the existing, already working tools which are perfectly effective, wheras America wants to create a new order online. Its a bit of a no-brainer as to why the Kremlin is doing so well.

The next US financial crisis?

2011-01-05T20:50:00.002Z

There's a fascinating article on CBS on the impending financial meltdown which will occur when state Government's bills come due and it becomes clear that there is no money left in the various pots:

In the two years, since the "great recession" wrecked their economies and shriveled their income, the states have collectively spent nearly a half a trillion dollars more than they collected in taxes. There is also a trillion dollar hole iln their public pension funds.

The states have been getting by on billions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, but the day of reckoning is at hand. The debt crisis is already making Wall Street nervous, and some believe that it could derail the recovery, cost a million public employees their jobs and require another big bailout package that no one in Washington wants to talk about.

The article features Chris Christie (Gov. New Jersey) heavily, something I wholly endorse as one of the few politicians who's A) willing to speak his mind in an honest fashion B) doesnt seem to care what people think about him, so long as he's doing what he sees to be his job.

Then there's New Jersey. It has the highest taxes in the country, a $10 billion deficit and a depressed economy when first-year Governor Chris Christie took office. But after looking at the books, he decided to walk away from a long-planned and much-needed project with New York and the federal government to build a rail tunnel into Manhattan. It would have helped the economy and given employment to 6,000 construction workers.

Gov. Christie acknowledged that's a lot of jobs. "I canceled it. I mean, listen, the bottom line is I don't have the money. And you know what? I can't pay people for those jobs if I don't have the money to pay them. Where am I getting the money? I don't have it. I literally don't have it."

It's always a little startling when a politician makes choices which are hard and then doesnt try to cover it up or give an excuse, I've come to the conclusion that its simply not fair. In our jaded age we deserve the opportunity to try and decipher what our politicians think through a series of buzzwords and half truths, its more fun that way. Christie is just spoiling the game by saying whats actually going on and why.

I can't imagine this story can play out in any good way, and it forms another compelling strand in the story of America's increasing structural weaknesses. I dont pretend to understand the complexities of State vs Federal funding, but if States can't pay their bills a lot of people will lose their jobs, and the USA as a whole will have to pay for those people somehow.

Further bailouts are of course possible, but will only service to weaken the already weak dollar, and this will only deal with the short term problem, not the longer term issues, particularly pensions.

More politicians like Christie might help, men who are willing to make brutual decisions in the short term to secure the long term, but they are few and far between, no matter where you go.

Strategy, friction and Ed Miliband

2011-01-04T21:46:00.003Z

Christmas was clearly a helpful break for Ed Miliband. It was a useful break for his team to finally start getting their heads togeather and pull togeather a strategy. Since hiring Tom Baldwin and Bob Roberts there seems to be a new energy emerging from the Labour camp. Its still nascient at the moment but I'm increasingly convinced its there.

The media of course is his friend, they want an Opposition party because it makes a better story to have two sides. So much so that with Labour running silent the media has worked hard to create two sides within the coalition, with mixed results. Vince Cable's recent faux pas being the most successful.

The Miliband team seem to have realised something very important, namely that the coalition creates a new faultline in addition to the usual Government/Opposition division. Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are very different beasts and, as Tim Montgomerie points out, many in the Conservatives are uncomfortable with the increasingly cosy atmosphere between the two Party leaderships.

Clausewitz described this in terms of 'friction', the grinding togeather of two forces until one collapses. Miliband is actually lucky, he has the natural point of friction which is a perfectly natural part of the UK political system, but he also has the opportunity to turn both opponents against each other to his ultimate advantage. Like any good insurgent he can benefit as much from the discord of his enemies as his own tactical successes.

The Coalition also struggles to present a unified face, just as any coalition must. Unruly backbenchers are all to willing to give quotes to journalists which undermine the party leadership. Building an effective stance against Labour will be very difficult when it is so hard to keep all your ducks in a row back home.

Miliband and his team must recognise that if they have to wait 4 more years for an election it is unlikely their man will be the Party leader. I'm not saying that to be disparaging, for all his fault Ed Miliband is actually a decent politican in my estimation. I've seen him speak on a few occasions and he can be passionate, engaging and quite witty when in his comfort zone. However, the shelf life of Party leaders is not great, and I would imagine at some point in the next 4 years there would be a move against him, leading to his weakening if not his destruction.

However, if there is an election sooner, the Labour party would probably put away their hatchets and focus on actually winning, and a victory would put Ed Miliband beyond any reproach for a number of years.

The chessboard of politics is very different for the first time certainly in my lifetime, and Miliband has real opportunities to play the game differently. It would only take a few Lib Dems walking away from the table and the Government would collapse, thats simple maths, all political scheming aside. Vince Cable does have a nuclear option, although its not limited just to him.

It will be interesting to see if Miliband and his team can embrace this unusual insurgent mindset. They have to move fast, punch hard, and exploit the strategic weakness of their opponents. A wedge driven firmly between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could so easily collapse the Government and usher in a new General Election.

Great round up of science fiction

2011-01-04T11:29:00.003Z

John Robb has written up a great list of science fiction (with one non fiction) titles recommended by his readers. I've not read all of these (although I just ordered three) but the ones I have read I would say are exceptional examples of the art. I know John's particular interest is in futurism, particularly around the idea of a Singularity. Here's the list with John's comments, my additions are in italics:

Makers. Cory Doctorow. The second industrial revolution -- at the micro scale.
Daemon and FreedomTM. Daniel Suarez. A second American revolution enabled by software. Resilient communities. Classic. (Daemon is, in my opinion, the substantially better book, but both are fantastic and well written)
Schismatrix. Bruce Sterling. Technology causes everything/everyone to diverge. This is where Blizzard got its idea for the Zerg.
Islands in the Net. Bruce Sterling. City state warfare (Singapore vs. Grenada).
One Second After. William Forstchen. EMP blast melts modern technology. Society collapses instantaneously.
Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson. Post nation-state thinking. "Burbclave" city states vs. "Fedland" (a bureaucratic nightmare of what's left of the gov't) vs. Criminal corporate franchises.
The Diamond Age. Neal Stephenson. Nanotech warfare. Nanotech future dissolves global social systems. People respond by recreating historical cultures to give meaning to their lives.
Eclipse Phase. An scifi paper role playing wargame. Transhumanism and spec ops warfare. The manual is copyleft.
Across Realtime. Vernor Vinge. This is the book that kicked off the concept of the Singularity (the idea that exponential technological change will soon, within decades, lead to a break in human history as humanity bootstraps into something unknowable).
The Singularity is Near. Ray Kurzweil. The definitive non-fiction analysis of the exponential trends leading towards a break in human history.
Ender's Game. Orson Scott Card. Classic of military scifi. Boy trained via endless wargame simulations to fight intergalactic war. (Probably the finest book when it comes to dealing with real strategy in a hypothetical future)
Tactics of Mistake. Gordon Dickson. Another classic of military scifi. Guerrilla war on distant planet -- ruse/deception used to force enemies to manufacture their own defeat.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Robert Heinlein. Colonists fight guerrilla war to secede. A classic.
The Windup Girl. Biotech dystopia.
Halting State. Charles Stross. Detective thriller about an infowar fought via MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

Two I would have added to this list are:

Without Warning, by John Birmingham. I would class this as a "bad singularity" novel, as it deals with a post singularity world in which the entire continent of North America is virtually depopulated. Leaving the rest of the world to stumble on in its wake.
Singularity Sky. Charles Stross. Personally my favourite of Stross's books, although I'll admit to not having read Halting State yet. Deals with a singularity happening to a planet of people who have already survived one (bad) singularity.

There are probably far more than that if I actually sat down to think about it. But I have to go onto Amazon and spend some of my Christmas money!

Book Review: Without Warning

2011-01-03T19:01:00.002Z

Its been a goodly while since I reviewed a science fiction book, although its not long since I read Senator's Son. I tend to read a ratio of about 2:1 in favour of non fiction books these days, so I've ploughed through quite a lot in the interviening time, none of it particularly exciting. For my Christmas break one of the books I purchased was Without Warning, by John Birmingham, it'd been lurking in my Amazon recommendations for quite a while, and I decided I needed some brain candy to suppliment the vast quantities of regular candy I would devour during the festive season.

I'm going to say it, but I usually go in with pretty low expectations about modern fiction (sci fi or regular), particularly when it has a miliary bent. Writers tend to be lazy, and basically just bang out a Vietnam war-esque nonsense, with little consideration for anything else. This book, which is science fiction in flavour, despite taking place in the 2003, is really excellent work.

The premise of the book is pretty interesting, America vanishes. Its pretty much that simple. A huge, incomprehensible wave of energy simply obliterates every human (and primate) from Seattle to Cuba. It leaves behind a wall of energy that no human can cross, cutting off most of the North American continent. The world is then left trying to figure out what the heck to do as the world lurches wildly out of control.

One weakness of the book is that several of the characters are pretty dull. They exist to service the audience's need to see how different parts of the world deal with the situation, leaving them a little two dimensional. However, the majority are really engaging, interesting and lively.

The author really gets into one important concept, if you eliminate the majority of people living on the American continent the a very large number of the Americans left will be soldiers overseas. The military is left trying to pull togeather the remaining population and figure out what to do without a Commander in Chief. The way the book is written suggests the author has taken the time to think about what this would entail, and he uses terminology as if he has actually taken the time to learn about relevant topics.

I wanted to write some spoilers into this review but I think I'll stick with just saying that many things which seem pretty realistic do indeed happen. The focus is pretty broad too, looking at the macro political changes, with certain countries on the rise, and others collapsing. The attempts to consolidate the new American political order (mostly in order to create a Commander in Chief for the military), all are examined in a great deal of detail, without being a grind for the reader.

This book is a well paced and entertaining read. Its utterly fantastical, but somehow keeps its feet on the ground. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants a bit of fun.

Cory Booker, destroying snow, with Twitter

2010-12-29T21:21:00.005Z

Hat tip to TechDirt for this fantastic piece.

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark in New Jersey, is probably one of the most clued up politicians when it comes to the social media, he's on there all the time, he responds to questions and comments from individuals, and keeps his followers up to date with what he's doing. It says a lot that I can follow his tweets and find them genuinely interesting, despite living on another continent and disagreeing with him about a large chunk of his politics.

Right now New Jersey is under an unbelievable amount of snow and Booker has used this to stage a collosally intelligent "real people" campaign. He's using Twitter to find out where people are struggling and then getting his people out to help them, or just going to their houses himself. His last tweets suggest he is out shovelling snow, he's also delivered diapers, and seems to have covered about half of Newark in his campaign to destroy all snow that lies in his path.

The best part is, that some of the blame for how bad the situation is might actually lie at his feet, but how hard is it to criticise the guy hip deep in snow clutching a shovel when he's trying to get vulnerable people what they need?

There's so much here which can be learned from its hard to know where to start. He's nailed the crisis by putting a human face on the solution, his own face, trying to inspire others to follow his example and get out to help others. He's staying on top of what must be an impossibly demanding twitter load, really connecting with people. He's also turned a potential PR disaster into something which is garnering positive coverage pretty much for everyone.

This is a man who gets social media, and gets the politics is a campaign every minute of every day. I'm literally in awe of how smart this guy (and his team) is.

Fighting back against Big Copyright

2010-12-29T11:22:00.003Z

There's a really interesting bit of news on ArsTechnica, RapidShare have hired a lobbying firm with the express purpose to "counter negative attacks on the company from US copyright interests." This might not seem like a big deal, but the file sharing industry has been almost painfully timid at fighting back against Big Copyright's campaigns against them. Despite provably doing nothing illegal, RapidShare was recently called out as one of the 5 worst websites in the world by Congress.

From the article:

It should come as no surprise that RapidShare has hired the same lobbying firm that Google uses—the Dutko lobbying group.

The registration form that RapidShare filed with the government makes it pretty clear what the three lobbyists the company has hired will be focusing on: "Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from US copyright interests."

Dutko is definitely a high-powered lobbying organization. According to the Open Secrets database, Dutko Worldwide generated $12,940,000 in lobbying income in 2010 in the course of advocating on behalf of Adobe Systems, Google, Motorola, Qualcomm, TiVO, Level 3 Communications, and dozens of other technology related firms.

Considering how much the content industry has gotten away with in the last few years its good to see that one file sharing service is actually starting to fight back.

Book review: Griftopia

2010-12-28T15:23:00.003Z

I like polemics, they speak to a writer who is passionate, engaged and have a strong opinion about the topic upon which they write. Since this is also the way in which I often speak and debate, this type of writing is thoroughly engaging to me.

Considering how little emotion there is now about the financial crisis I was pleased to happen upon Griftopia, a book clearly written by someone who has channeled a great deal of anger into a topic which should anger anyone.

Written by Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, Griftopia posits a relatively simple premise, that the US economy has been engineered by the major banks in a fashion which serves to stripmine the country for any remaining money (and credit) into the pockets of the aforementioned banks. The mechanism being used to achieve this is the creation of 'bubbles' within the economy, primarily the tech and housing bubbles.

Taibbi writes with an engaging style, often deeply profane but rarely without purpose. He is also one of the few writers who is able to write about high finance in a way which actually makes some sense. I've come away able to actually understand what derivatives are (somewhat) and why commodities trading is liable to leave us all broke.

This books fits well within the emerging narrative which I think is likely to define at least the next 20 years, the slow collapse of the United States, as it confronts growing internal and external problems. It deals with a major systemic problem, namely, that the political process has broken to such an extent that private interest can no long be restrained in any effective fashion. Although on a personal political level I dont believe in a great deal of regulation, but I also believe the private companies, left entirely to their own devices will slice the head off the goose that lays the golden egg searching for a massive immediate payoff, rather than taking their daily egg.

I always take a book like this with a pinch of salt, the writer has a point to make, and their proof will have been selected in order to make it. However, a part of me feels that if there was a solid case to be made that this book was a lie various banks would probably have come crashing down on his head in court. He specifically calls several out, particularly Goldman Sachs (who he describes as a 'vampire squid'), and directly blames them for knowingly creating a global recession and preparing to create another one. Thats the sort of thing you don't want in print if you're a major company.

Overall this is as thoroughly readable and interesting a discussion of how global finance as I've ever read. Unapologetic for its rage and all the better for it, it weaves a sage narrative about banks who are actively engaged in stripping America of its remaining assets and weakening the remaining legal statutes that will slow their progress.

A tragic tale of greed, capitalism perverted into something monsterous and men corrupted by the philosophy of pure profit.

A failure to maintain

2010-12-27T18:26:00.004Z

I decided today, for no particular reason, that it was time to clean out my twitter "follows" (the people who I follow, not those who follow me) and I noticed an interesting trend. Whilst considering who I should drop, one of the most significant segments were British politicians, virtually no MPs survived in the final analysis (more on those who did later).

Political commentators like Tim Montgomerie did pretty well, journalists dropped off in pretty good numbers, but nothing exceptional, it was just MPs who got a resounding kicking. Hence I sat down and tried to figure out why this was.

The only answer I can come up with is that MPs by and large are absolutely terrible at social media if they don't have someone in a press office prodding them with a sharp stick to put posts up there. For most people the purpose of Twitter is to form an aggregate news feed, and to respost things which are of interest to us.

So what have MPs, and Governmental people been doing wrong?

A surprisingly large number have "moved" their twitter accounts. For example, Number 10 (for American readers, this is essentially the 'Government' Twitter feed, or as close as we have to one) has moved. Why that would be, I have no idea, they moved from one variation of Number10 to another, so its not like they started out with the twitter name "BastardsInGovt" and decided they needed something with decorum. They just decided to make it harder for me to follow them.

Others, and I'm looking at you, candidates for the Labour leadership, created dual accounts, one for their role as an MP, and another for their campaign. Thats a rookie move in itself. It misses the point that your twitter feed is "you" to those who follow you, a seperate campaign oriented feed just makes life complicated, and leads viewers to be confused about which one is 'real' and whether the second account is a PR exercise being operated by the intern in your HQ.

Most simply don't use their accounts any more, the "vacant lot" approach. During the election they were posting on a regular basis, now theres rarely anything being said. This is a real dropped ball in many ways as theres every reason to suggest that if you post interesting things people will follow you and engage with you.

Others are stuck on "transmit" mode, doing little to engage with their audience or create a discussion or debate. Thats a real shame, as a large number of MPs are erudite, interesting people who could do a lot if they got more involved in the street level debates going on on Twitter.

Tom Watson, Robert Halfon and to a lesser extent Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell deserve special mention, agree with their politics or not, they do get it. Hence they have survived my brutual cull of the chattering classes. However it should be noted that by and large, they have survived not because I find their politics interesting, but because of their rich and varied interests which mean they talk about a great deal more than what they last voted on, the political equivalent of talking about the weather.

As a result, I'm more likely to follow Felicia Day (actress/geek/web celeb), Cory Doctorow (Blogger for BoingBoing/Writer/geek) or Mark Pack (Head of Digital at MHP/Co-editor of Lib Dem Voice), because they actually have something interesting to say, and most show a willingess to discuss, rather than to constantly transmit.

Its a real shame more MPs don't take the time to really engage with this medium, particularly the younger, more tech savvy generation, for whom Twitter is a fact of life, not some novel new thing which has just come along. The grassroots are out there, waiting to listen, to be pursuaded, and to get into the debate, but there's no one listening in the post election world.

UPDATE: Excellent comment from Mark Pack, so much so I thought it worth pulling into the main body of the article to ensure people see it:

I've noticed a lot of Liberal Democrat MPs have taken their use of Twitter down a gear or two since the election. I don't think though that generally it's a case of not getting social media but rather:

a. Good MPs are *very* busy people, especially if they are also ministers

b. Via their postbag and regular constituency surgeries they get to dip in and out of what their constituents are thinking in a way that social media performs this role for many others

c. Even after this May, the vast majority of MPs are from a pre-social media generation and they instinctively turn to other methods which come to them more naturally (and so, arguably, are more efficient for them)

None of this is to argue that social media can't have a major role for many MPs - far from it - but I think it does help explain how good MPs make decisions to downplay social media that are based on something more than just not getting it.

Merry Christmas one and all

2010-12-25T12:58:00.002Z

I wanted to post a short message to say Merry Christmas to everyone who takes the time to check in on this blog. I hope you're all having a great day and spending time with the people you care about.

For my part I'm home with my family, having a wonderful time, and am the recipient of a huge pile of books. Notable highlights include Eating Soup with a Knife, Griftopia, The Accidental Guerrilla and Macrowikinomics. I'm fortunate to have a family who have long since stopped asking about my curious reading habits and now reserve themselves to asking when I plan to invade Poland.

I'd like to say thank you to all the people who've helped make this blog what it is. I started this project out mainly as an exercise in getting my own thoughts in order about various things, and over time its grown into more and more of an interactive exercise. Its still a thrill when something I write generates comment and criticism. My readership has grown every month and I hope to continue to earn more readers in the new year.

Special thanks to James at the Campaign War Room for providing me with advice and guidance both online and off. We've collaborated on a few things now on overlapping interests throughout the year and its been a lot of fun. He's also guaranteed to have at least one thing worth reading on his blog every day.

Ian from Only Dreaming has been a great help both behind the scenes and online. An old schoolfriend its been great to work with him on a couple of projects. The main one being Westminster Hubble, a concept he brought into reality with style. Hopefully we can work on some more projects in the coming year (if either of us can find the time).

Also thanks to David from Kings of War whose commentary on one of my posts generated a lively discussion on the nature of Anonymous and its role in the future of online conflict. This is a debate we're seeing more and more in the mainstream media and I'll be writing more about it in the future.

I'm sure there are other people who deserve thanks, and I'll try and remember who they are later on.

For now, I'm going to go and eat until things start to hurt.

Have a wonderful Christmas all.

Christmas downtime

2010-12-21T21:07:00.001Z

Blogging will be light for the next week or so as I'm going home to celebrate christmas with my family. Hoping to get the odd piece up, but I can't claim it'll be my top priority. I'll be around sporadically however, so keep an eye out.

Ahh Christmas

2010-12-15T11:29:00.002Z

The Christmas season is well and truly upon me and today will largely be taken up with the work Christmas "do", which promises to be a relatively good time for all.

In the interim, here are a few links:

Thomas Rid has a great piece on Kings of War on the use of the media by the US military as a tool to help their force projection overseas:

The first lesson is for public affairs officers and info-ops folks alike, especially outside the United States: if you want to project power, use the BBC. The British media outlet didn’t just say the exercise was “designed to show the military strength of America and its allies,” it helped the U.S. Navy achieve that objective. In the past years, especially American commanders have become much more adept at using the media — “trained, objective observers,” as they said during the planning for embedding in the Iraq War — to get across a certain message. In the case of the BBC video, the real addressee is pretty obvious. And let’s be honest, the Navy did a superb job in getting the right pictures and quotes into the BBC report

Worth reading if you're in PR particularly.

I've been watching the debate about whether DDoS attacks are a form of civil disobedience. The best piece I've seen so far is Evgeny Morozov's piece (hopefully spelled right) on Slate, assessing Anonymous's attacks against the theories of John Rawls:

John Rawls, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th century, offered one of the best modern theories of civil disobedience in his 1971 masterpiece, A Theory of Justice. Rawls defended civil disobedience as long as the breach of law was public (i.e., authorities were notified of the disobedient act before or shortly after it occurred), nonviolent (i.e., the disobedient act did not impinge on the civil liberties of others and caused no injuries), and conscientious (i.e., the disobedient act was underpinned by serious moral convictions). Furthermore, Rawls argued that those who practice civil disobedience should be willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, if only out of their fidelity to the rule of law.

James at The Campaign War Room has some thoughts on the effectiveness of "real people" in campaigns. This is an issue extremely close to James' heart and his argument is cogent and useful:

As I've blogged here before, using real people in political and corporate campaigns can transform the power of the message. It's one thing to hear Ed Miliband talking about how the cuts are affecting ordinary people, but another thing to hear from the people themselves who have lost their job or who are worried about doing so. Similarly, it's one thing to hear from a CEO saying that a change in Government legislation will push up the cost of doing business, but another to hear from a hard pressed customer or a less affluent employee. Corporate campaigns can particularly gain from this approach because it is so unusual and therefore has a much greater chance of being noticed.

I'm afraid thats all I have time for at the moment as I'll be dragged away momentarily, but more blogging will follow later in the week.

In closing, taking a look at XKCD's exceptionally funny comic on Wikileaks:

How Clegg could go

2010-12-14T22:23:00.002Z

As promised I finally got the full story on how the Liberal Democrat rules work for forcing a vote for a new leader (or keeping the old leader).

In essence you have to get 70 constituency Lib Dem parties to say they want a vote, its that simple. If you can get 70 of them to get in a line and say they want it, you can go wild.

The thing is, theres no rule on the size and significance of the constituency organisations so you could go round the houses in some seats the leadership doesnt even know it has supporters in.

Anyway, thats my two cents for the day. I've been avoiding blogging in favour of more time spent on twitter following the rapidly unfolding student fees news and the Wikileaks stuff.

Amazon is coming crashing down

2010-12-12T21:08:00.008Z

There are reports all over Twitter and blogspace that Amazon is down. So far confirmed domains which are not responding are .UK, .DE, .IT and .FR.

Speculation is rife that Anonymous is to blame. It remains to be seen how true this is, but given whats been going on lately, it seems pretty likely that this isnt a coincidence.

UPDATE: Amazon's European Data Services are apparently down in their entirety. If thats the case, and this does turn out to be Anonymous, its a whole other level. It is in fact, srs bsns.

UPDATE2: Speculation is now rife that a botnet was involved with a DDoS take down of Amazon, with sites now coming back online.

UPDATE3: This is a screenshot of a tweet (now taken down) from Anonops:

UPDATE4: Amazon services are back up, no word from the company as yet.

UPDATE5: Loads of speculation now, but its fair to say any Amazon site going down is a massive deal and basically unprecidented. Whatever happened was a massive problem for the company. Business Insider have a surprisingly good bit on it.

I'M CALLING IT: This wasnt Operation Payback, nor was it any conventional part of Anonymous. If it was caused by something external to Amazon itself (I still wouldnt be surprised if it turns out to be some sort of monumental internal screw up), it was a massive botnet.

Only time will tell and I need sleep.

The crisis war machine

2010-12-12T19:35:00.005Z

I've just finished Eric Dezenhall's book Nail 'em, Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses, his first book on crisis communications. Coming before Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong there's a marked difference between the two books. In an effort to describe some of these differences I'm going to try and review both and draw out some of what makes Dezenhall one of the finest resources for good lessons on crisis comms.

The reason I personally like Dezenall is
that he actually looks at a crisis as what it is, conflict. The immediately frames the issues of crisis communications in their most useful setting.

Dezenall sets up all crises with 6 key components:

The victim: Essentially the person who initiates the crisis, the wronged party, usually a private citizen or group of citizens who have been hurt by another party in some fashion, either physically or emotionally.
The villain: The company or individual who did the hurting of the victim. These are almost invariably rich and/or powerful entities.
The vindicator: The entity which will right the wrongs inflicted on the victim. Usually some form of activist organisation of some sort.
The void: This is the space that's hardest to define, essentially the crisis must play into the passive expectations of everyone else, otherwise its not interesting to the media, and thus the audience doesnt exist. For example, big chemical companies are expected to dump harmful chemicals on people, thus the void can be filled with this.
The vehicle: The mechanism by which the victim delivers the attack on the villain e.g. the internet, media or any other form of dissemination.
The value: The justificaiton for the attacks, e.g. public safety, "right to know" etc.

In my experience this list holds true in pretty much all cases, its never this simple of course, but it does form a useful checklist, and a good way of framing any crisis you experience.

One of the reasons I like Dezenhall is that he emphasises speed and an agile response above everything else. It wouldnt seem out of place to read some of his phraseology (albeit slightly reframed) in a Marine Corps memoir. He also makes a solid case for defining victory early on, and allowing for flexibility in what definition, not every battle is supposed to be won by beating your opponent, some crises are best solved by settling with a victim out of court, others by full fledged battle.

One weakness of both books is Dezenhall's relative lack of knowledge with the internet and the opportunities it presents for attackers. Its not a criticism, but its clearly not where he is at his most comfortable. He scrapes the surface, and does a good job of it, but the pervasive and undying nature of internet rumours arent really explored in the way that more conventional attacks are. Its fair to say that these types of attacks are significantly harder to deal with anyway, and thus a discussion of them is less relevant.

What is excellent is the portrayal of the media as crisis junkies, who validate and reward members of the public for wildly overeacting (or inventing) problems and going after companies. Its a fair point, every journalist wants to break the next Watergate or the cigarette companies, unfortunately they want to do it over the weekend and be ready for print on Monday. Thus they cut corners and find stories which really arent worthy. Its rare to go a month these days without seeing the word -gate applied to the end of a word. This year we've had bigot-gate and cable-gate, just off the top of my head.

The problem is that companies and public figures havent grown any more comfortable with the battlefield environment they find themselves in. Responses remain muted, and too often the temptation is to bunker down rather than fighting back. In boxing the right response to being punched is to counterpunch, not fall back, as it is with communications. Of course wildly swinging doesnt help either, you've got to try and figure out the right response, but you've got to do it within minutes or at worst hours.

One of the most important things to remember is that ultimately all responses are based on gut instinct. Theres often very little time to get data togeather, although flash polling and other data gathering tools can be used, but at some point you have to take a breath and decide what the heck you're going to do.

Dezenhall paints a vivid picture of crisis comms at its best and at its worst, and how both can be achieved. He makes sage points on how you can turn weaknesses into strengths and the importance of finding ways of reframining the debate early to your advantage.

These are books about how to win, by any means avaliable. There's a Malcolm Tucker quote which fits rather well (and crudely) from the final episode of the 3rd season:

Their hordes of f**king robots, they're coming over the hill towards us, and all you've got to do is this, bend down, pick up any f**king weapon you can and twat the f**kery out of them

I'd love to post a link to this, but I'd be breaking the law if I did. If you do want to see it I absolutely don't advise you to go onto YouTube and search for "In the Thick of It" Its the final speech Malcolm gives.

In closing, one final quote from Nail 'em by Otto von Bismark, summing up much of what Dezenhall can teach us:

We live in a wonderous time where the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak is strong because of his audacity

A rough day for coalition politics

2010-12-11T21:39:00.003Z

As the drama over student fees shakes itself out there are a couple of pieces of news which don't bode well for the coalition.

First up it's being reported that a group of Conservative MPs are demanding Cameron 'listen' to their concerns:

A Conservative backbencher arriving for the crucial vote on tuition fees summed up the sinister atmosphere.

"If there is a chance the Coalition could lose, I will vote against them," he said, a vindictive edge to his voice.
The MP in question had no truck with the proposed rise in university tuition fees. He was angry about a range of other grievances he had been nursing since the Coalition came to power. Now he saw a chance to make himself heard.
And he was not the only one. On Thursday afternoon, the Tory whips were left scrambling for votes as the mood on the Conservative back benches turned rapidly sour...
Tensions boiled over at a tumultuous session of the 1922 committee of backbenchers on Wednesday during which MPs exploded in anger at Sir George Young, Leader of the House.

"It was very ugly," said one MP present. "Some of the older members said it was the most ferocious session of the 22 they had known in twenty years."

Most worryingly for Mr Cameron, it was not the usual suspects making trouble.

The most vociferous critics of the Coalition were new intake MPs, young, ambitious men and women in their 30s and 40s...
The new intake are expected to lead the charge. "We estimate 50 MPs, almost all new intake, are possible future rebels," said one source close to the whips' office.

This news shouldnt be seen as wildly surprising, plenty of Conservatives were going to have a problem with the direction of the Government, particularly if Liberal Democrat policies make their way to the fore.

The next big challenge I can see will be over the Alternative Vote referendum, set for early next year. There is already a great deal of pressure coming from the House of Lords to move the date of the referendum back, so it doesnt fall on the same day as the local elections. There are huge opportunities for division and its likely to draw out the same dividing lines as the student fees vote.

Its worth noting however that there are various smaller bills over which back bench Liberal Democrats will take an ideologically different stance to Conservatives and the Government, keeping emotions high. Control orders being the most notable.

There's also new polling data out which shows a dramatic drop in Liberal Democrat support since the election:

Extensive polling of 2,000 people who voted for Nick Clegg's party in May suggests just 54 per cent will back the Lib Dems in five years' time. Some 22 per cent of Lib Dem voters say they will chose Labour.

The polling, conducted by Lord Ashcroft, the former Tory deputy chairman, and revealed exclusively by The Sunday Telegraph, also shows that 44 per cent of Lib Dem voters in May say their view of the party has "got worse."
Some 62 per cent of Lib Dem voters say they would still have chosen the party if they had known the result would be a Lib-Con coalition – and 49 per cent think the party was right to join the Tories in government...

However, only 28 per cent say their preferred outcome in 2015 would be another Lib-Con coalition – just one point more than the number who want a Labour majority government.

Some 24 per cent would like a Lib-Lab coalition while 10 per cent would prefer a Tory majority.

Furthermore, when asked to rank 10 politicians from one (terrible) to 10 (excellent), Lib Dem voters place Mr Clegg only fourth, with an average score of 5.05.

The leading Lib Dem is Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, who is second on 5.28, behind the Prime Minister on 5.63. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is last on 4.54.

Almost two thirds, 65 per cent, say they back "on balance" the coalition plan to cut spending and reduce the deficit, with 31 per cent opposing it.

However, in a separate question, 59 per cent agree with the suggestion that the cuts are "too drastic and too deep."

I'm always somewhat sceptical of polling when the raw data is so hard to get hold of, as statistics are so easy to cherrypick, but from the looks of this its going to be very challenging for Nick Clegg in particular to keep the spirits of his party up in the face of a growing public consensus.

A friend of mine who has worked for quite some time with some senior Liberal Democrats was explaining to me that according to the Lib Dem constitution its quite easy to force a vote of no confidence in the leader. To my regret I'm unable to remember the full details at the moment, but I'll try and post them next week.

If Clegg takes another hit and his Party starts to shift against him in a big way next year it'll be hard for him to hold firm in the face of internal opposition. I don't really believe he'll be pushed out any time soon, but the mere sniff of it would be dangerous for his position. If he does go then anyone selected in his place will be under huge pressure to withdraw support for the Government.

Ultimately, the picture being painted across the board right now makes it hard to imagine how the coalition will stay the course for the next few years. With YouGov's latest tracking poll showing CON 40%, LAB 42%, LDEM 9% it'll be interesting times ahead.

Los Zetas, the catalyst of the Mexican insurgency

2010-12-10T21:24:00.003Z

There' s an excellent article in The Counter Terrorist on Los Zetas, the most infamous of the Mexican cartels. It gives a solid overview of their origins, as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, through to their emergence:

Deserters from the Mexican special operations force, Known as GAFES (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales), they became the close protection detail for Gulf cartel kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen. Under the command of "Z1" Arturo Guzman Decenas, the original 31 Zetas brought their skills and combat tradecraft to bear for the Gulf cartel's business interests...

Once in place, the original Zetas each trained a cadre of soldiers, recruited from state and municipal police forces And, in some cases, the rank and file of Mexico's army. This initial group of elite bodyguards catalyzed an evolution of lethal force and tactics used within Mexico's criminal underworld. Late model SUVs with tinted windows and no license plates became the normal method of transport. Tight shot groups in Los Zetas' victims indicated a high level of proficiency, though this particular high-skill level has diluted over the years.

Their split with the Gulf Cartel and emergance as a cartel in their own right:

The Gulf-Zeta split broke the duopoly known as the Company, which had been maintained by both factions to pursue drug trafficking and distribution, human trafficking, product piracy, kidnapping, and petroleum theft.

And now their expanding business interests and growth as a major player in the Mexican drug deal:

The Zetas are known to have pilfered large quantities of oil from PEMEX (Petroleos Mexicanos) to fund their enterprises. Gangsters have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years...

Meanwhile, a firefight between Los Zetas' gunmen and the Mexican military left five dead on July 27, when Los Zetas fought to retain control over a PEMEX well near Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas. The petro theft constitutes a symbolic and a financial threat to the Mexican government while providing a vast stream of income, perhaps as much as $715 million a year, that gangsters use to buy weapons, bribe officials, and bankroll their brutal assault against the Mexican government.

The concluding paragraphs paint a grim picture for the Mexican state:

Los Zetas have spread from an original 31 mercenaries into a sizable private army and criminal enterprise. On the business side of the house, they specialize in drugs, human trafficking , small arms trafficking , extortion (street taxes), kidnapping (levantones), murder, petroleum theft, and CD/DVD piracy. Indeed, drug trafficking likely comprises less than half their criminal revenuegenerating portfolio. Their current allies include factions of the Beltrán-Leyva organization, the Juarez and Tijuana cartels, Bolivian drug clans, thirdgeneration (transnational street/prison) gangs, and the Italian 'Ndrangheta. They conduct raids and ambushes, and employ small unit infantry tactics supported by intelligence operations to engage in close quarters battle with state security forces. Assassinations of police and political figures, including mayors and candidates for state office, and threats against journalists and judicial officials, round Out their violent range of actions.

They employ these means to thwart competition from other gangs, to control economic spheres of influence, and increasingly to control territory to avoid interference from the government and determine who runs the state. In short, the Zetas are waging criminal insurgency against their competitors and state institutions. To do so, they increasingly employ threats (in March 2009 they threatened to kill Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom; in August 2010 they killed two Mexican mayors)... They have the tactical skills to produce insurgent-style, high-order street violence. They also pose a significant threat to state security forces. It remains to be seen if they can consolidate their reach and sustain their onslaught before meeting a more proficient rival (licit or illicit).

The Zetas have operated as a powerful catalyst for the violence which is currently ripping through Mexico. They served to destabilise not only the existing cartel structure, which had until then been relatively sedate, albeit powerful. They have also fought the state to a near standstill, operating as a non state military force in both the countries and many cities.

The real risk is that the Zetas continue to share their skillset with allied gangs, both in South America and into the United States. If the distribution gangs the Zetas do business with were adopt the high level sophistication which the Zetas demonstrate there is no fundamental reason for them to be any less successful.

The Mexican insurgency continues to grow over time, posing a threat not just to Mexico, but also its neighbours. It remains to be seen if the state can ever recover, and if neighbouring states, particularly the USA, can push back against violence.

Illness and work

2010-12-10T07:14:00.001Z

A quiet week this week, but I'll be back on form over the weekend. Illness and a significant amount of work have been getting on top of me. Stick with me, I've got at least two (somewhat) interesting pieces coming up.

Anonymous and Wikileaks

2010-12-09T20:45:00.003Z

James at The Campaign War Room has written a piece on Anonymous and its involvement with Wikileaks in the wake of the widespead campaign to cut the organisation off, primarily from its financing. So far PayPal, Mastercard and Visa have taken steps to prevent further payments to Wikileaks. It appears that these companies have been under pressure from the US Government and in the case of Mastercard and Visa may have acted to protect their own interests, as the memos have revealed the extensive lobbying which the US Govt has done on their behalf in Russia.

In response Anonymous have gone on the warpath in support of Assange, and have gotten a great deal of media coverage along the way. The fact that Anonymous are going after major banks, and large corporations seems to have caught the media's interest.

Interestingly in this case Anonymous attacks through DDoS attacks have been largely ineffective. A few bank websites were taken down, but PayPal and Amazon were not affected.

Anonymous has gone after some hard targets before and done relatively well, but this was a whole other scale and its been interesting to watch the reaction within the Anonymous community. Here's a quote from a poster which emerged a couple of days ago:

We have at best given them a black eye. The game has changed. When the game changes, so too much our strategies.

Instead its suggested that Anonymous members sit down with the cables as they become avaliable and start digging information out of them, focussing on whats relevant to their local area, and posting it through any avaliable means online.

The shift in strategic focus is pretty smart. Wikileaks is likely to remain headline news for quite some time to come, and by providing additional analysis will almost certainly yeild insights which would not otherwise reach the mainstream. This tactic was pretty successful when it came to Scientology, and exposed the inner workings of ACS Law.

In essence I believe the role of Anonymous will be relatively limited beyond providing a resiliance to the distribution of the memos in preperation for their final full release. I've just taken a look at a couple of websites which are distributing the encrypted files and there are thousands of people who are downloading, or have downloaded the memos. Anonymous is promoting this resiliance by highlighting the opportunity people have to download the material and distribute it to others.

Of all the analysis I've seen so far on the Anonymous attacks I've most enjoyed this piece (hat tip to Techdirt) which asks the question of whether these activities are really the modern high tech equivalent of a sit in. Evgeny Morozov has this to say:

Launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default; we have to think about the particular circumstances in which such attacks are launched and their targets. I like to think of DDoS as equivalents of sit-ins: both aim at briefly disrupting a service or an institution in order to make a point. As long as we don't criminalize all sit-ins, I don't think we should aim at criminalizing all DDoS.

Its a fair point, since the Anonymous attacks were against websites, not against the underlying infrastructure which allows card payments to be made, so really it wasnt going do much more than annoy a few people who wanted to access these sites. Ultimately thats the point of a sit-in, its to inconvenience people and create a small irritation for the organisation targetted. Considering that students across the nation have been running sit ins for weeks, and UKUncut have targetted TopShop and other companies for similar activities, should we consider webspace differently?

The future of protest will incorporate a digital component, thats simply the world we live in. However we've continuously seen the Government and policy wildly overreact to the digital world. People have been jailed for threatening to 'blow up' airports on twitter, so its hard to imagine how the police would deal with an entity like Anonymous. I can only imagine they'll claim it requires sweeping new powers, as these things always do.

Online protest is a component of modern protest, not a seperate entity. Over time the two movements will be drawn togeather more and more, with each section taking on its own unique roles. UKUncut could, for example, organise for its membership to download and use an equivalent program of Anonymous's Low Orbit Ion Cannon to take down the websites of Top Shop or Vodafone. In many ways I'm surprised they havent already, it'd be a lot more impactful on those companies to lose a days worth of revenue from their websites.

The online protest movement remains nascient, and its hard to tell what its future holds, however we can make some assumptions which seem inevitable. Sophistication will grow and the barriers to entry will become lower.

Terrorism as a brand

2010-12-08T07:48:00.003Z

There is an interesting interview with science fiction author William Gibson on Vulture. He's got some views on terrorism which I thought were worth sharing:

You also wrote in Zero History that terrorism is “almost exclusively about branding but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.” How so?
If you’re a terrorist (or a national hero, depending on who’s looking at you), there are relatively few of you and relatively a lot of the big guys you’re up against. Terrorism is about branding because a brand is most of what you have as a terrorist. Terrorists have virtually no resources. I don’t even like using the word terrorism. It’s not an accurate descriptor of what’s going on.

What do you think is going on?
Asymmetric warfare, when you’ve got a little guy and a big guy. [There are] a lot of strategies that the little guy uses to go after the big guy, and a lot of them are branding strategies. The little guy needs a brand because that’s basically all he’s got. He’s got very little manpower, very little money compared to the big guy. The big guy’s got a ton of manpower and a ton of money. So this small coterie of plotters decides to go after a nation-state. If they don’t have a strong brand, nothing’s going to happen. From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding...

Did terrorism find the right time to shine because it’s so easy to disseminate your international brand?
Everything about the world we live in today furthers dissemination of brands or any other sort of information. It’s a rich time. Forget terrorism, it’s the age of branding. I’m becoming increasingly unwilling to call it terrorism. It plays into a particularly ignorant sort of rhetoric that is very widespread. If the terrorist can get you to think about what he’s doing as terrorism, you’re already in his win position.

The asymmetry of fighting against terrorists is just as applicable to the asymmetry of recognition. Al'qaeda and other terrorist organisations are often discussed in the same context as major national militaries, as if in reality they are the same size.

Over at BoingBoing Professor Mike Brown makes a good, and related point, about the attachment of people to Pluto as a plane t. He theorises that because images of Pluto almost universally misrepresent the actual size of Pluto, causing people to think its about the same size as Earth or Mars.

Percieved power is power, the more widely you can disseminate your brand the more effective it will be. Its true for businesses and its true for terrorists.

Finding the important in the complex

2010-12-06T22:07:00.004Z

ZenPundit has a short piece up today on complexity, featuring an excellent TED video which I think is worth taking a look at:

TED is a phenomenal resource if you like finding the novel ways in which people take extremely complex topics and translate them for an audience of people who usually have no knowledge of the subject matter.

Here's Zen's take on the type of complexity found in needlessly complicated documents, (notibly this infamous slide):

Excessively complex representations, much less the bureaucratic systems in practice, are poor vehicles for efficient communication of strategic conceptualizations to the uninformed - such as those downstream who must labor to execute such designs. Or those targeted by them for help or harm. In addition to the difficulty in ascertaining prioritization, the unnaturally rigid complexity of the bureaucracy generally prevents an efficient focus of the system’s resources and latent power. The system gets in it’s own way while eating ever growing amounts of resources to produce less and less, leading to paralysis and collapse.

Not much I can add to that, apart from an "Amen"

Dealing with journalists - An alternative approach

2010-12-06T21:24:00.002Z

Before anything else, watch this little YouTube video kindly send to me by one of my colleagues a little while ago.

This is a pretty standard journalist trap, made somewhat more creative and entertaining by the supporting character, The Cookie. The politician in this case is Stephen Duckett who, I have learned through my extensive research on Wikipedia, is an Australian economist and health services manager.

The video is undeniably funny, as Duckett tries to evade the journalists questions by cunningly eating a cookie at the slowest rate a man has ever consumed a snack food. He even goes so far as to try and engage the journalist in conversation about how darn good the cookie is.

So is he an idiot? The video certainly suggests he is, but I think there's something very smart going on here, under a veneer of sillyness.

Usually the Bad Person being assulted by the media would charge out barking "no comment" into every microphone within reach. This will lead to a comment in the paper the next daying "Bad Man refuses to comment on Bad Thing". On the other hand, no editor is going to sign off on a story that says "Bad Man ate cookie", because that seems a bit weak all in all.

The press needs a quote, it always needs a quote, and therin lies the strength of the Bad Man. If you can stay clear of saying something incriminating, if you can seem cool and in control (its hard to look guilty whilst eating lunch) then you get to walk free and clear whilst the media tries to put a spin on the nothing that you said.

Of course its a balancing act, stay too far out of the media's gaze and you're 'mysterious', 'aloof' or 'elusive'. The appearence of hiding is toxic, you have to step out and into the blow sometimes and ideally roll with it.

Anyway, this little video amused me, and its a good case study on how to deal with the media in the heat of the moment.

Book Review: Senator's Son

2010-12-05T21:23:00.004Z

Three things happen when I get into a grind at work, I read a lot less, I focus on any one particular book less (I've got about 4 sitting partially read on my shelf) and the quality of what I read diminishes rapidly. So it was a pleasure to have a week off and actually get to some reading done. The one book which stood out was Senator's Son by Luke Larson, having read ZenPundit's review of it some time back its been on my shelf (the imaginary shelf in my Kindle) for quite a while and I finally got to it.

Senator's Son is one of the very few books which I've read that actually contains some real military thought. Ender's Game is one of the others. Written from the perspective of a group of soliders operating in Ramadi and although fictional is based on the experience of the author and soldiers, particularly Marines, who he knows and has worked with.

Its a difficult book to read, ultimately it paints an uncomfortable tale of the early days of US involvement in Iraq, unable to really get to grips with the insurgency. The reaction of the Marines is to fall back on fighting tactics which don't apply to the environment. This is neatly summed up by one of my favourite John Boyd quotes:

When I was a young officer I was taught if you have air superiority, land superiority and sea superiority, you win. Well in Vietnam we had air superiority, land superiority and sea superiority, but we lost. So I realised there was something more to it

As the Marines struggle to initially recognise, and then adapt their behaviour to, what Boyd realised in Vietnam, the story progresses. The key realisation they have is that the war in Iraq is not a war about shooting people, its a war about people and winning their support. Over time they adopt new and novel ways to do this, honing their understanding of how Iraqi's do business and building lasting structures to help them.

The book also deals with the difficulties of men on the ground who have to operate within the restrictive strictures of organisations which are very distant from their reality. At various points military commanders force them to undertake unnecessary risks in order to please his whims, and the Marines are faced with the loss of funding after a Government department seeks to take control of local reconstruction projects, again putting lives at risk.

Strangely, almost perversely, this book makes the case for the military as a nation building organisation, if properly organised and motivated. In the book the Marines are a self organising organisation, they stumble their way towards understanding and over time achieve it and use it to bring safety and security, which is ultimately to their own benefit, as well as for the people of Ramaldi.

The word which best sums up this book to me is 'believable'. The characters truly operate in the way people would in these highly stressful, challenging conditions. Most of them struggle deeply to go beyond their training, feeling that it puts their lives at risk and isnt their job. They are a parable of the fundamental flaws in both British and American operations overseas.

This book is a real achievement, taking a difficult and dry topic and translating it into a real story, which intrigues and fascinates at every step. The historical narrative remains intact, and the impact of key players on those on the ground, something which deepens the story.

This is an elegant and well written book which perfectly encapsulates the many issues which confront us as we move still further into the world of irregular warfare. As the US gears up to enter Yemen, and the Afghanistan conflict shows no real signs of drawing to a close, it'll be increasingly important to understand that we're not trying to kill enemies, we're trying to change minds.

A real reaction to Wikileaks

2010-12-04T14:50:00.002Z

Hat tip to Techdirt for highlighting the response which should have been taken from day one with the Wikileaks material. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' response is measured, calm, and actually looks at the reality of the situation, rather than resorting to wild overreaction and panic:

Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.” . . .
Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Many governments – some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

The whole way this is framed is elegant, subtle and in three paragraphs sums up the entire issue in terms which are useful and persuasive.

Small Wars Journal have the full text of the Q&A session here, and its worth taking a look at as it contains a breakdown of the response the military will be taking to ensure it doesnt happen again:

First, the – an automated capability to monitor workstations for security purposes. We’ve got about 60 percent of this done, mostly in – mostly stateside. And I’ve directed that we accelerate the completion of it.
Second, as I think you know, we’ve taken steps in CENTCOM in September and now everywhere to direct that all CD and DVD write capability off the network be disabled. We have – we have done some other things in terms of two-man policies – wherever you can move information from a classified system to an unclassified system, to have a two-person policy there.

And then we have some longer-term efforts under way in which we can – and, first of all, in which we can identify anomalies, sort of like credit card companies do in the use of computer; and then finally, efforts to actually tailor access depending on roles. But let me say – let me address the latter part of your question. This is obviously a massive dump of information.

Gates is the first Governmental figure I've seen speak on this issue without coming across as shrill and his answers are a confident, no nonesense approach to the issue.

This is how the Government should have been talking about the issue from day one. This section bears repeating to drum the point home:

Many governments – some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

Thats how you communicate in a crisis. You set the good with the bad, you make a real assessment of the problem and you make your opinion public. You stick by it rigidly, you maintain your confidence in it, and you ride out the storm. You're not ashamed, you don't cower, you own it and tell people to get on board.

Congratulations SECDEF Gates, your comments deserve to be in every newspaper on the planet.

Take a moral position

2010-12-03T20:04:00.003Z

There have been a few good posts lately on morality and its importance in both Government and politics. Hat tip to both John Robb and ZenPundit for these articles. Its been on my mind for a while to write something from my perspective as a communications consultant on the importance of a moral position to the perception of brands and individuals.

Its fair to say that it is far easier to be disliked than liked, and its not hard to be reviled. The bigger the brand, the more chance there is that scrutiny will dig up nasty details that will cause people to dislike you. Plenty of major brands suffer from this to one extent or another. Tesco is a good example, McDonalds is another. Microsoft struggled for a long time, and Apple is (in my opinion) just starting onto what will be a long slow decline.

There are a group of companies that are hated for reasons which are (relatively speaking) beyond their control. BP is probably the best current example. Ultimately the recent troubles they've had were a statistical possibility no matter what they did, and sooner or later, some sort of oil related disaster was going to happen.

For the majority of companies however, it is concious actions that lead to poor reputation, aided by a generally negative culture which, particularly in the UK, is suspicious of success.

The response by most companies is to undertake a vigerous CSR program, you can look at more or less any major company and find a bit of their website dedicated to the trees they plant, the things they recycle and the schools they give books to. Sadly, this has become so ubiquitous that it doesnt serve to garner a great deal of respect in the main.

The problem is that most companies have confused what it is that makes them unpopular, its not the activity they undertake on the outskirts of their business, its what resides at the very core that causes people to dislike them. Most people are able to take a nuanced enough view to understand the difference between CSR and activities which could be summed up as greenwashing.

Fundamentally, I believe, people are able to recognise what it is to be ethical, and ascribe companies instinctively with a moral value. You can't act evil on a day to day basis, then put out a press release about how you're planting trees in order to save the environment and expect people to treat you any differently.

Innocent smoothies were doing a great job, their brand was about as strong in the public eyes as is possible. But when they aligned themselves with Coca-cola they took a big hit in public perceptions. Due to the negative perceptions surrounding Coke were such that merely being associated with it was framed as a betrayal of Innocent's core values of healthy drinks.

In order to change perception you have to alter behaviour at the core level and adopt a positive moral stance. Consider Google, a company which generates almost universally positive opinion, despite being basically a monopoly and terrifying powerful. They get endless favourable press and widespread coverage of much of their anciliary activity. Even when they do something daft, like attack network neutrality, they somehow get away with it.

Google have avoided the appearence of greed, by investing widely in a range of programs like the self driving cars, they look like a technology company which is looking to provide things people want for the future. They've focussed their attention on relevant positive areas, which people are interested in and excited by. Its hard to argue that building a self driving car is anything other than a good thing.

The Conservatives had to undertake an extremely tough rebranding exercise when David Cameron took over the party. He revamped the Party aggressively around a positive new agenda, with the environment a major part of it. This was highly counter intuitive and was met with scorn initially, but by sticking consistently to the message and demonstrating a commitment to it, it grew in credibility over time.

When the expenses scandal hit Cameron went out and asserted a moral stance. Those who had exploited the system were simply wrong, and deserved to be punished. He didnt shy away from this and his attitude matched public sentiment perfectly. He also undertook measures early on to punish those who had clearly misbehaved. Although these measures were hardly earth shattering, they were significantly more than any other Party did, and the public responded well to his responsible attitude.

Coming into the election the Conservatives were seen as the Party with positive answers for the country, compared to Labour, who were percieved to have taken a negative, opportunistic aspect. The public is almost always turned off by aggression and negativity and I believe this key difference, between a moral positive stance, and a negative opportunistic one, played a major part in the election

Building this approach can be difficult, particularly for companies which have an extremely negative perception currently. It can take years, as it did with BP, and can be shattered in minutes, as it was with BP. It has to be consistent, relevant and something which people within the organisation are going to invest in.

The public finds its hard to trust, and will never give their trust easily. You've got to be willing to invest years, and actually believe in what you're trying to achieve if you expect the public to do the same. Money isnt enough to take you there, money will often trip you up.

Morality has a key part to play in changing attitudes towards brands and companies, if only because a strong moral stance is so damn unexpected.