Red Cells

What is it about terrorism that makes US Commentators talk nonsense (Washington Post)?

Wikileaks recently obtained a document which asked what should be the rather unsurprising question 'Does the US export terrorism'.

Of course the US exports terrorism, for the simple reason that the US is a rich county with a very large population of second and third generation immigrants who can afford to engage in the irredentist politics of what they imagine to be their homeland.

The UK has the same problem. The causal nexus of the strife in the Punjab that led to the 1984 siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar was almost entirely located in Birmingham England.

Until September 11, Rudy Giuliani would never pass up an opportunity to attend an IRA fundraiser. But support from New York City flowed to both sides of the sectarian conflict in Ireland, just as they do to both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian issue.

Expatriate irredentists are often the biggest obstacle to a peace process. They fund the conflicts but experience none of the consequences. They collect the money to buy bullets and bombs to murder and maim, but they only every acknowledge the injuries caused against their side. So the expatriates are always the last holdouts.

This is of course known to anyone who specialized in counter-terrorism before 9-11. But since then everyone in the security world has declared themselves an expert in counter-terrorism, most basing their models on the experience of the cold war era when the most visible terrorist groups were state sponsored.

How an Israeli attack on Iran might proceed.

Glenn Greenwald is engaged in another argument with Jeffrey Goldberg over the latter's article in the Atlantic in which he is very clearly beating a drum for a US war on Iran.

Greenwald initially pointed out that Goldberg had something of a credibility problem given his earlier role in peddling some of the stories used to claim a casus belli for the US invasion of Iraq. Since then it appears that he has caught Goldberg in an outright lie. Even so, Goldberg appears to have been largely successful in framing the debate on war with Iran as to whether the US should attack first or let Israel start the war.

The argument from Goldberg et. al. appears to be that if Israel attacks Iran, Iran will retaliate and that this will force the US to come to Israel's defense following Iran's inevitable retaliation. I find this a rather unlikely scenario as it leaves out of consideration the reaction of China, Russia and US public opinion and the fact that any US response would be constrained by time and logistics.

Planning for wars takes a considerable amount of time. Even if the US was minded to immediately declare war on Iran, it could not do so immediately and the costs of doing so would be rather obvious. The US public would wake up to the possibility of being drawn into a third neo-con war in defense of the country that was unambiguously the aggressor. It is doubtful that a majority of Republicans would support that proposition, let alone Obama's base.

When Obama addressed the nation from the oval office, his only real option would be to call on all sides to accept a cease fire on the basis of a US-Russian-Chinese plan being voted on by the UN security council and look to take credit for saving Israel from its own foolish leaders.

Netanyahu is no fool, he knows that he can't launch an attack against Iran and then go run crying to the US's skirt after the inevitable retaliation. Those are the tactics of cowards and schoolyard bullies. Netanyahu would only launch an attack if he is certain he knows where the nuclear material is and he is certain that Israel would win the inevitable war that would follow. Since only a lunatic would be certain of either proposition the prospects of an Israeli attack on Iran are rather small.

BadB and anti-Americanism

Its good to hear that Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ has been busted.

But take a look at his business card and remember that this is a Ukraine/Israeli citizen. Then ask yourself if the people who are doing Internet crime are purely in it for the money.

While the money is certainly a large part of their motivation, there is clearly a nationalist motivation as well. While the fall of the Soviet Empire was considered a very good think in the West, some people in the East were not so happy. And Horohorin, 27 was 8 when the communist system collapsed. He probably does not remember the secret police or the gulags.

It is strange but true that some people find the most bizarre, abominable things imaginable to idolize. When I was in college some students used to love to shock people by declaring their support for General Pinnochet, a man they knew to be responsible for several tens of thousands of murders.

How to bias a poll

Selection bias free, I am sure.

Take Our Obama Socialism Survey And Receive Free "Impeach Obama" Sticker | The Conservative Caucus

Spies amongst us

Yesterday I discovered I have been living near to a pair of Russian spies for the past ten years and never noticed. Today we start to discover just how lame those spies were. Shoddy tradecraft, falling for ridiculous ruses, what clowns!

I beg to differ.

Looking at the tradecraft described in the complaints it does not appear to be markedly different from the methods used by the KGB in the Soviet era. Some of the tools had changed, wireless laptops had replaced the old dead drops. But they were using the exact same methods that they had used in the Soviet era when the KGB successfully infiltrated both MI5 and the FBI.

And that for me is the real reason why the Russian spying antics were so pathetic: the times had changed, they had not. Which at root is the whole problem with the Putin crowd and its attempt to turn the clock back to the Breshniev era of 'Stalinism-Lite'.

First off, lets get the terminology right. The spies that were just caught were not agents, they were operatives. That is the field level spy masters. A real life James Bond does not go and steal the information himself, he recruits locals who have already have access to the information to act as agents. The division between operatives and agents is an important one in intelligence work: the agencies will generally do whatever they can to protect operatives, agents are generally considered expendable.

The Russian ten spies did not attempt to burrow into government agencies or perform classified work directly. Their covers were only designed to be good enough to fool immigration and would almost certainly have been exposed in a positive vetting process. To be effective as spies following the old KGB model the Russians would have to recruit agents with access to the information they wanted.

We yet don't know if the spies were successful in recruiting agents, though we may well find out if there are further arrests. While the tools of the operative are money, ideology and blackmail, it is only the last one that is practical with respect to cold-calling in a democratic society. Mercenaries such as Hanssen and Ames are typically walk-ins. They decide they are going to betray their country by themselves and then make contact. The same is typically true of ideologues.

Lets say you are an NSA employee and have been identified as a target by a Russian operative who approaches you with an offer of money in return for secrets. Even if the amount of money on offer is tempting (a million dollars say), the risks are enormous and the approach is very likely to be a trap. The competent traitor knows that they have to reject any unsolicited offers and be the party that makes contact themselves.

This leaves blackmail, which has always been the primary tool of the field operative. An offer of money is likely to be rejected and reported, an offer of money coupled with a threat is much less risky. Later this year the IETF will be holding a meeting in Beijing. As a somewhat senior information security professional I would consider it something of an insult if I was not targeted by a honey-trap operation. A few years back a police raid on an 'Asian massage parlor' in Silicon Valley uncovered hidden cameras in all the rooms. While it is possible that the owner was merely a pervert, many of the clients captured on the tapes would have access to technology that China would very much like to acquire.

In the Soviet era, the KGB could use a very powerful form of blackmail: reprisals against relatives still in their power. Co-operation might mean permission to live in Moscow for a parent or sibling, refusal might mean loss of a job, internal exile or being denied critical medical care.

Putin's modern day spies had much less to work with. The US is a far more open society than it was ten or twenty years ago. Exposure as an adulterer or homosexual might damage personal relationships but is not going to end a career or result in prison unless your job happens to be running an anti-gay bigotry association.

Its not just the tools that have changed, the objectives have as well. Twenty years ago an operative who obtained an internal telephone directory for a government agency would be a hero. Today the information is most likely up on a Web site (and more likely to be up to date). Want a background profile on the new assistant director for widget command? His kids are probably on Facebook, his classmates certainly are.

For the past couple of years I have been attending weekly seminars at MIT on cybernetic aspects of international relations. In a nutshell the Internet is having major effects on national security, diplomacy and the way that wars are fought in future. Russia, China and the US are each attempting to work out what military and foreign policy doctrine is going to be in the Internet age. The MIT/Harvard project funded by the Minerva Institute is looking into these issues.

Isn't this exactly the sort of stuff that Russia would want to send a spy to sit in on? Is it likely that any of them did? Well not if they were illegals unless they wanted to attract quite a bit of attention.

And here we get to the real incompetence of the whole affair. We do not know what the spies may have acquired but the fact that they were allowed to operate, observed for over a decade shows that they probably didn't acquire very much that was damaging. How much more could the Russians have acquired if they had spent the same amount of money on a room full of clerks searching Google?

The Chinese espionage activities leave me equally skeptical. I do not doubt that they exist, the documentation is conclusive. I just think that they are more likely harming the Chinese economy as helping it. As long as China focuses on stealing foreign innovation, development of their own technology base will suffer.

We do not yet know, we may never know the reason that the arrests happened now, but one possibility is that the spies were so incompetent that they were actually hurting US interests. This may sound odd to someone brought up with the notion that being spied on is a bad thing. But in international relations terms there is a real value in transparency. If I do not have anything to hide, I want my adversary to know that I do not have anything to hide. If I stop him from confirming that I have nothing to hide he is going to go off and invent an explanation for my refusal and plan against it. that is going to make his behavior more random (bad) and possibly more aggressive (very bad).

We may never know, but it does not look like the Russian ten were doing much to improve transparency. The Russians probably knew less as a result of their efforts than they would have without them.

Rand Paul: Worse than a racist.

Rand Paul's tortured explanation of his opposition to parts of the civil rights act is being taken by some to indicate that he is either a covert racist or wishes to send a covert signal to racists that he is on their side.

Rand Paul's supporters are attempting to show that Paul's interest in positions that have traditionally been shout out to racists is in fact due to his deep and sincere belief in the rights of the individual and not a continuation of the covert-racism that many GOP figures such as Trent Lott and Jesse Helms engaged in for decades.

While there are many reasons to be skeptical of these claims, the counter-claim that Rand Paul is a rigid ideologue rather than merely a racist is actually a lot worse.

If Rand Paul is taken at his word, he is such a rigid ideologue that he would have opposed the real improvement in personal liberty provided by the civil rights act in favor of an abstract, theoretical definition of liberty. In Paul's world only the government can threaten liberty. No action by a private citizen can ever threaten liberty unless it involves coercion. In Paul's world, liberty matters above all else, but the term liberty has a fluid meaning that can be adapted to any purpose.

In the real world of course, the private individuals in the South could only discriminate by calling in the force of the state to remove blacks from whites-only lunch counters. As with Paul's assertion that 'tort law', not government regulation is the answer to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the gulf, libertopia is only achieved by ignoring state involvement in the favored case. Tort law is created by government legislation and (in common law jurisdictions at any rate) the decisions of government courts. Paul is not insisting on an absence of government regulation, he is insisting that the government is only allowed to regulate through retribution.

Libertarians are fond of the notion that the political spectrum is two dimensional, with a libertarian/authoritarian axis in addition to the left-right divide. The claim being that authoritarianism rather than any particular economic theory was the common factor in the totalitarian governments that came to power in the 20th century.

Rand Paul would clearly like to be placed on the libertarian end of the spectrum. But if we look at the consequences of his ideology rather than his purported principles he starts to appear distinctly authoritarian. Like Lenin he insists on placing a theoretical liberty defined by his rigid ideology above actual liberty.

Libertarians like to claim that they had no part in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. But this is only true if we ignore Latin America where a series of generals insisted on the need to defend liberty by replacing the democratically elected government through a military coup. And the fact that stalwart 'libertarians' such as Milton Friedman could support such murderers in the name of 'liberty' is certainly proof strongly suggests that it is a rigid commitment to ideology that is the defining enabler of totalitarianism above all others.

Stupid political arguments of our time

John McCain says it is 'Time To 'Pull The Trigger' On Tougher Iran Sanctions' [TPM LiveWire].

There is just one teensy little problem. The US already has a full economic embargo on Iran. It is illegal for any US citizen to engage in any form of commerce with Iran including buying Iranian made goods and selling goods to Iran. So when McCain is saying that the US should pull the trigger, he is referring to a gun that has already been fired.

The only way that the US can bring any greater pressure to bear on Iran is by getting other countries to support the sanctions regime. And that in turn is made rather difficult by the fact that US credibility is rather poor after the lies told by Obama's predecessor to gain support for the US invasion of Iraq.

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

Cool

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

Using field studies, lab experiments, and computer models, the biologists discovered that hermit crabs join together in what is known as a "synchronous vacancy chain" when they are looking for a new home.

Cry Anti-Semitism

There are still a large number of people who ascribe to a wide variety of bigotries. But I think rather few people will agree that current criticism of the Pope's handling of priests who raped children is in any way motivated by sentiments comparable to anti-Semitism [BBC News].

At the root of the current crisis is the fact that the current Pope was determined to suppress criticism of the church by any means, even if doing so would inevitably lead to offenders being left to rape yet more victims. And now the claim of anti-Semitism is being made in the faint hope of bullying critics into silence.

The claim might be received a little more sympathetically if the Vatican had actually managed to apologize for its failure to condemn the holocaust as it was happening. Likewise it is rather hard to see an institution as being victimized by bigots when it spends so much time and effort promoting the cause of anti-gay bigotry.

Scholarship at the AEI

In the wake of the firing of Frum, Charles Murray makes an unintentionally revealing post on the nature of the AEI and AEI scholarship.

Murray is also an AEI fellow, but he purports to be posting independently. In particular he states: I do not have any certain information to convey about David’s departure, except what Arthur Brooks has already said publicly: David resigned.

In other words the only "certain information" that Murray is stating is best described as a lie. While Murray's statement may be technically a true statement, it is intended to deceive and thus a lie. Murray is no doubt aware that the condition under which Frum could remain was to go from being paid what Murray describes as a 'handsome salary' to being unpaid. To insist of calling this a 'resignation' is dishonest.

Once we understand that this is the game Murray plays, we can see that the apparent denial of donor pressure influencing AEI policy in Murray's third paragraph is in fact nothing of the sort. Murray describes a very specific scenario in which donor pressure does not take place "The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president...". The scenario is presented as being a 'fantasy', but nowhere is there actually a denial.

Murray is again being intentionally deceptive. As he must know, Frum alleged only that he was told not to write on Health Care Reform as it was likely to upset the donors. He did not allege that the donors made any complaint, which is the charge Murray decides to rebut.

After stating that he has no information, Murray theorizes that the reason for Frum's departure is his lack of work for the Institute. Murray himself admits to drawing a salary on the same basis, but gives no explanation for why Frum was forced to resign and he was not.

In making this complaint against Frum, Murray unintentionally admits one of the principal charges critics make against the AEI: it disburses patronage to Conservatives who toe the party line without expecting anything in return beyond use of their name on the letterhead. But for the pseudo-academic patina of his AEI 'fellowship', Charles Murray would be just another crank who wrote a covert racist screed.

But then look at how Murray finishes his piece:

I think that’s what happened. I also think that for David to have leveled the charge that Arthur Brooks caved in to donor pressure, knowing that the charge would be picked up and spread beyond recall, knowing that such a charge strikes at the core of the Institute’s integrity, and making such a sensational charge without a shred of evidence, is despicable.

Here Murray unintentionally demonstrates a complete lack of any capacity for self-examination. The next sentence after making a charge he admits he has no evidence for, Murray accuses Frum of having made a charge without a shred of evidence.

As Murray himself admits, he has no evidence other than what is in the public domain. While Frum has provided no evidence to support his assertion that members of the AEI were told not to write on health care, the AEI has made no attempt to refute the charge and no evidence has been presented to show the contrary. Since it is implied that Frum himself was one of the people told not to write on Health Care Reform, his own testimony is evidence. Now whether the word of Frum alone is persuasive (he was an AEI scholar after all), it is clearly not true to claim that there is no evidence.

If Charles Murray is representative of AEI 'scholarship', it is an institution whose integrity is not so much compromised as non-existent.