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[ by Charles Cameron — Assange, WikiLeaks, Google Ngrams, impact assessment — and a digression ]

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Charles, duc d’Orleans

1.

Let’s start with Julian Assange; we’ll get to Charles d’Orleans later.

In the movie Julian Assange: a Modern Day Hero? Assange claims for WikiLeaks‘ massive Afghan / ISAF leak

It’s the most detailed history of any war that has been made, ever. It’s significant.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that WikiLeaks has had some impact in many areas of our complex world — but as I was watching the film the other day, I found myself wondering just how small its cumulative impact is, in comparison to that immense complexity.

2.

Assange makes various claims for WikiLeaks in the movie, but perhaps the most instructive one comes at the tail end of his statement describing the WL project as a whole:

WikiLeaks is a project of Sunshine Press; Sunshine Press is a collaboration between journalists, technical people, cyberpunks, some anti-corruption people, and some fairly famous civil rights activists, to try and get as many documents as possible out onto the internet that have never been released before that will produce positive political reform.

Let’s take Assange’s expressed hope that WL will “produce positive political reform” as the benchmark here.

Has it done that? Are there any signs that it will? What positive political reform, precisely?

Have, for instance, the Afghan WikiLeaks influenced the outcome of the war in Afghanistan?

3.

Or – to put the same question slightly differently – is or was WikiLeaks all a bit of a nine-days-wonder?

Google’s Ngram Viewer allows users to search for the frequency of uses of specific terms across a large volume of books over a specific time frame. It cannot have escaped the attention of folks at Google (or no such agency) that an Ngram-style timeline of mentions of names and terms of one sort or another in news articles from the leading news sources would be of similar interest.

A promo page on the movie notes that “WikiLeaks and Assange have been one of THE news stories of 2010” and suggests “There is a new WikiLeaks story in the media every week and the next wave involves the big banks in 2011” – not to mention “Julian Assange will remain in the news all year as his controversial sex crime charges come to a head later in 2011” – no doubt a popular selling point…

Is there a new WikiLeaks story in the media every week? I’m wondering what a Ngram of news mentions of WikiLeaks across the last two or three years would show.

4.

What’s a “nine days wonder”?

I had to use Google myself to verify that “a nine days wonder” (as opposed to “a seven days wonder”) was the phrase I should be using.

I was delighted to find that an old hero of mine – the poet Charles d’Orleans – was among the first to use it:

For this a wondir last but dayes nyne, An oold proverbe is seid.

I have always liked d’Orleans since I first ran across his poetic “confession” to God and his priest:

My ghostly father! I me confess,
First to God, and then to you,
That at a window, wot you how,
I stole a kiss of great sweetness!

To steal is sinful, to be sure, and kisses carry their own moral burden – but confession and penitence purifies the soul.

The thing is, reparation must also be made — and so it is that d’Orleans continues by vowing to God:

But I restore it shall, doubtless…

— the stolen kiss, that is.

He’s willing to give it back — always assuming that particular “window of opportunity” is still open…

5.

But I digress.  Which raises the question: is there a purpose to digression, do you suppose?

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, silos, Y2K, 9/11, rumors, wars, Boeing 747s, Diebold voting machines, vulnerabilities, dependencies ]

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The “bug” of Y2K never quite measured up to the 1919 influenza bug in terms of devastating effect — but as TPM Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

1.

My own personal preoccupations during the run-up to Y2K had to do with cults, militias and terrorists — any one of which might have tried for a spectacle.

As it turned out, though, Al Qaida’s plan to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was foiled when Albert Ressam was arrested attempting to enter the US from Canada — so that aspect of what might have happened during the roll-over was essentially postponed until September 11, 2001. And the leaders of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, acting on visionary instructions (allegedly) from the Virgin Mary, announced that the end of the world had been postponed from Dec 31 / Jan 1 till March 17 — at which point they burned 500 of their members to death in their locked church. So that apocalyptic possibility, too, was temporarily averted.

2.

Don Beck of the National Values Center / The Spiral Dynamics Group, commented to me at one point in the run-up:

Y2K is like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.

— and that quote from Beck, along with Barnett’s observation, pointed strongly to the fact that we don’t have anything remotely resembling a decent global map of interdependencies and vulnerabilities.

What we have instead is a PERT chart for this or that, Markov diagrams, social network maps, railroad maps and timetables… oodles and oodles of smaller pieces of the puzzle of past, present and future… each with its own symbol system and limited scope. Our mapping, in other words, is territorialized, siloed, and disconnected, while the world system which is integral to our being and survival is connected, indeed, seamlessly interwoven.

I’ve suggested before now that our mapping needs to pass across the Cartesian divide from the objective to the subjective, from materiel to morale, from the quantitative to the qualitative, and from rumors to wars. It also needs a uniform language or translation service, so that Jay Forrester system dynamic models can “talk” with PERT and Markov and the rest, Bucky Fuller‘s World Game included.

I suppose some of all this is ongoing, somewhere behind impenetrable curtains, but I wonder how much.

3.

In the meantime, and working from open source materials, the only kind to which I have access – here are two data points we might have noted a litle earlier, if we had decent interdependency and vulnerability mapping:

Fear-mongering — or significant alerts?  I’m not tech savvy enough to know.

4.

Tom Barnett’s point about “the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age” still stands.

Y2K was what first alerted me to the significance of SCADAs.

Something very like what Y2K might have been seems to be unfolding — but slowly, slowly.

Are we thinking yet?

[ by Charles Cameron — complex situations, unexpected consequences, analysts’ need for semi-random knowledges ]
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Suppose you’re a Japanese journalist given a news report to write about a tourist who may have contracted an obscure disease on a visit to Zaire. The job seems straightforward enough, you expect your Japanese readers to be sympathetic to the plight of your Japanese tourist subject, you don’t exactly expect your readers to include one Shoko Asahara, guru of Aum Shinrikyo…

But he’s there in the penumbra, reading… as this report from the Center for Counterproliferation Research of the NDU testifies:

In 1992, Aum sent a team of 40 people to Zaire to acquire Ebola. Led by Asahara himself, the team included doctors and nurses. During an outbreak of Ebola in Zaire, a Japanese tourist visiting that country may have contracted the hemorrhagic fever. This report, which received considerable publicity in Japan, apparently inspired Asahara to mount the expedition to Zaire in October 1992. Ostensibly, this trip was intended as a humanitarian mission, called the “African Salvation Tour.” It is not known if Aum actually obtained Ebola cultures. A Japanese magazine quoted a former member of the group, “We were cultivating Ebola, but it needed to be studied more. It can’t be used practically yet.”

One things leads to an unexpected other.

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Here’s a positive example, one that I heard on the radio yesterday, and nothing to do with terrorism — except perhaps at the cellular level:

You know, the Scottish surgeon George Beatson was walking through the highlands in England, and he heard some shepherds saying, oh, you know, when we remove the ovaries of cows and goats, the pattern — or the breasts of these animals changes; the pattern of milk production changes.

So, Beatson began to wonder, well, what is the — this was a time when no one knew about estrogen. So, Beatson began to wonder, what is the connection between ovaries and breasts? And he said, well, if ovaries are connected to breasts, then maybe they’re connected to breast cancer.

And he took out the ovaries of three or four women with breast cancer and had these spontaneous, had these, not spontaneous, but amazing remissions. And it was — this is the basis for tamoxifen, the drug that actually blocks estrogen, and thereby affects breast cancer.

I mean, who would have thought that walking through and talking to a shepherd in Scotland would affect a billion-dollar drug, which is very, very powerful against breast cancer today?

One thing leads to an unexpected other.  Listen.

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Back to terror — and what jihadists notice, think about and discuss:

They follow the news.

If the stock-market takes a dive, the folks on the forums know about it — and crow about it.  Because, as bin Laden said, AQ’s policy is one of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.” Inspire magazine calls it “the strategy of a thousand cuts” and claims the “aim is to bleed the enemy to death”.  Daveed Gartenstein-Ross‘ book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, is abundantly clear on that point.

So yes, they follow the news.  So they know about the riots in the UK.

There was an interesting short flurry of tweets on Twitter a couple of days ago, when Will McCants, who monitors such things and runs the Jihadica blog, noted: “Lots of pictures of #londonriots being posted to Ansar jihadi forum” and followed up by quoting a couple of forum comments: “God is burning the ground beneath the feet of the Crusaders” and “We are witnessing this aggressor nation quaking inside and out….collapsing and suffering defeat by the permission of God”.

Jason Burke of the Guardian picked up on McCants’ post and noted, “so now Islamic militants exploiting #londonriots” – and Aaron Zelin of Jihadology chimed in with the tweet I quoted at the top of this post.

The conversation continued for a bit, but it’s Aaron’s comment that I want to focus on, because it makes explicit the kind of seamless weave of knowledge that I’ve been thinking about lately — which makes cross-disciplinary awareness both so necessary and so feasible at this time.  Let’s call it Zelin’s law:

every event and issue will be exploited by every group and ideology on the net.

Here’s my corollary: one thing leads to an unexpected other.

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So what?

So we need a supersaturated solution of knowledges where decisions are made.

So our analysts need to be speckled specialists — experts with a sufficiently wide and random assortment of additional odd knowledges to be able to frame and reframe and reframe, to shake off any group frame and suggest half a dozen plausible alternatives, to doubt each one of them in turn, to turn to the right people who are themselves specialists in those other framings, to ask, to listen, to hear…

So we also need a supersaturated solution of ignorances — admitted, and inquiring.

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Here’s Herbert E Meyer on the non-bureaucratic qualities of first-rate analysts:

In normal circumstances people like this would never be willing to take government jobs. Moreover, any agency that hired them would soon be driven nuts by their energy, their drive, their seemingly off-the-wall ideas, their sometimes bizarre work habits, even their tempers.

Sometimes bizarre, eh?  “Embrace the maverick,” Deputy Director for Intelligence Jami Miscik advised.

And by extension, embrace the unexpected — learn to expect it.

Is there a literature of the unexpected? Read it! And I don’t just mean read Nicholas Nassim Taleb‘s Black Swan — I mean, keep tabs on the undertows, read the opposition, read the factional fights within the opposition, read the underclass and upperclass, the radical and the pacific and the merely eccentric and the totally off the wall.  Know that some people believe there is a reptile in Queen Elizabeth II‘s head — and I don’t mean people who hold some variant on Paul MacLean‘s triune brain theory!  Read the ancients as well as the moderns.

Note especially the places where two fields or perspectives or framings overlap — they’re the places where experts can most easily see that each others’ approaches have value.  Cultivate binocular vision — and I mean, vision.

And do all this with a fair amount of randomness, with curiosity.

I happen to study religion, for instance, and splatter myself with other things — epidemiology, for instance, and complexity, and lit crit, and medieval music and plenty more besides — just enough to give a vaguely Jackson Pollock look to my interest in religion.

And Aum Shinrikyo’s attempt to gather samples of the Ebola virus isn’t an epidemiology story, isn’t a new religious movements story — it’s at the intersection, it’s both.

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How many fields of knowledge can you gossip in for a minute or three? That’s a question with profound implications in terms of networked interactions and collective understanding.

How many languages can you frame your questions in?

[ by Charles Cameron — care and feeding of authors and publishers, secrecy and transparency, Abu Muqawama, New Yorker ]

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I am a writer.

I somewhat understand the need for writers to be supplied with books and food, and that publishers of various sorts, online and off, take on the costs of finding us and giving us a public hearing – but I also think it’s idiotic for the best of our thinking to take place in gated communities.

On matters concerning national security, for instance…

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Two quick DoubleQuotes with a touch of that old time hacker religion…

And specifically…

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Certain things need to remain secret, I accept that. And there’s an inevitable tension, an ongoing tug-of-war between secrecy and transparency that even Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase “information wants to be free” admits, and that even the intelligence community responds to with CIA’s declassified search box, its responses to FOIA requests, and publications such as the unclassified extracts from Studies in Intelligence.

But here’s where I’m with Abu Muqawama:

The New Yorker has locked this article, which is silly, because this article has real policy relevance yet most of the people who need to read the article do not subscribe to the New Yorker.

Thankfully, Abu Muqawama / CNAS have summarized the piece in question, so you can read what it’s about and figure out for yourself whether you need to read the whole thing…

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So here’s a round of applause for all those who do bright thinking about world affairs in public view – or make such thinking available.

You are doing us all – I gasp to think of it – a public service.

Israeli intelligence officers caught on camera moments before carrying out an assassination of a HAMAS terrorist.

“Information wants to be free” – Stewart Brand

You do not need to be Alvin Toffler or Marshall McLuhan to have noticed that as a result of the information revolution that in the past decade, much like individual privacy, secrecy has taken one hell of a beating. While Wikileaks document dumping demonstrated that much of what governments overclassify as “top secret” are often simply diplomatically sensitive or politically embarrassing material, the covert ops raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was a reminder that some actions, operations and lives are critically dependent on secrecy.

Secrecy in the sense of intelligence agencies and other actors being able to carry out clandestine and covert activities is rapidly eroding in the face of ominpresent monitoring, tracking, hacking, scanning, recognition software and the ability to access such data in real time, online, anywhere in the world. A few examples: 

Col. TX Hammes at Best Defense –The Internet and social networks are making it harder to work undercover

It is virtually impossible for an agency to provide sufficient cover for a false name. If you provide information like where you went to school, what posts you have served before, etc., the information can be quickly checked. (Most yearbooks are online; graduates are listed in newspapers; property records, etc.) If you don’t provide that information, then your bio sticks out.

Giving an intern the list of names of personnel at an embassy and telling them to build the person’s bio from online sources — with cross-checking — will quickly cut through a light cover. It will also challenge even a well-constructed cover. I think this is going to be one of the challenges for human intelligence in the 21st century.

Viewdle is a Two-Edged App and Panappticon

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

Haaretz –Hamas man’s Dubai death was a Mossad-style execution

What makes the security camera shots released last night by the Dubai police interesting is the professionalism exhibited by the suspected assassins of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

They arrived on separate flights from different destinations; one of them flew in via Munich and Qatar. They stayed in different hotels and were careful to make phone calls using international routers. They wore clothing that makes them difficult to identify. One is seen with a mustache and a hat, others wearing hats and glasses. They try, throughout, to appear to be innocent tourists or business people, there to enjoy themselves and even play some tennis…

Pity the poor intelligence officer operating without diplomatic cover. A false beard and glassses will no longer suffice.

What kind of adaptions are possible or likely to take place by intelligence, law enforcement, military and corporate security agencies in the face of an emerging surveillance society? First, consider what clandestinity is often used for:

• To avoid detection
• To avoid identification even when detected ( providing “plausible deniability” )
• To facilitate the commission of illicit acts or establish relationships under false pretenses
• To conduct covert surveillance
• To collect secret information of strategic significance (i.e. – espionage)
• To facilitate long term influence operations over years or decades

Taking the long term view will be required. Some thoughts:

One effect will be that marginal subpopulations that live “off the grid” will be at a premium someday for recruitment as intelligence operatives. These “radical offliners” who have never had a retinal scan, been fingerprinted, had their DNA taken, attended public school, uploaded pictures or created an online trail, been arrested or worked in the legal economy will be fit to any false identity constructed and, if caught, are unidentifiable.

Another will be the creation of very long term, institutional, “false front” entities staffed by employees who will never know that the real purpose of the enterprise is to provide airtight legitimate covers and that the economic or other activities are merely ancillary. They won’t be standing jokes like Air America or the various business activities of Armand Hammer, but real organizations with only a few key insiders to facilitate periodic use for intelligence purposes. A similar tactic will be intel agencies “colonizing” legitimate entities like universities, law firms, consultancies, media, financial institutions, logistical and transhipping corporations and NGO’s with deep cover officers who are intended to make ostensible careers there. This of course, is part of basic intelligence history but the scale, subtlety and complexity will have to significantly increase if authentic “legends” are to stick.

Then there’s the creepier and less ethical path of intelligence agencies stealing and using the identities of real citizens, which hopefully a democratic state would eschew doing but which bad actors do now as a matter of course in the criminal world.

Speed will also be an option. As with the Bin Laden raid, fast will increasingly go hand in hand with secret, the latter being a transient quality. If you cannot avoid detection, like the Mossad agents out playing tennis on survellance video, beat the reaction time. Clandestine may also come to mean “Cyber” and “Robotic” moreso than “HUMINT”

Being invisible in plain sight is an art that will grow increasingly rare.