http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/27/sciwar127.xml

http://warandhealth.com/predicting-casualty-causing-attacks/

http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/agc282/zia/2008/06/wars_have_powerlaw_distributio.html

Really don’t know what to think about this kind of material. Any thoughts?

“Redirecting U.S. military forces substantially to an asymmetric threat is misguided for three reasons. First, it allows U.S. national security officials and military planners to ignore the real degree of the revolution in conflict that is underway. Second, it promises to get and keep the United States involved in conflicts in which it is often counterproductive to become militarily embroiled. Finally, it risks forfeiting the much more important global role for U.S. military power: deterring and responding to major conventional aggression. The argument here is not that the United States should ignore asymmetric conflicts around the globe or that they pose no threat to U.S. interests. Rather, such conflicts represent less of a threat to the United States than has become fashionable to assume, and the military instrument of statecraft is the wrong tool to deal with them”

Full Article (.PDF)

A Chinese mafia boss who worked as a Communist Party adviser has been jailed for life for running a private army to intimidate business rivals.

Yang Shukuan drove round the city of Tangshan in an armoured personnel carrier and owned a fleet of other military vehicles – as well as a Rolls-Royce, two Ferraris and 20 other cars.

He also had a cache of arms, some of which he “borrowed” from friends in the police, and used his quasi-military force to intimidate his opponents.

The case has highlighted how “gangster capitalism” has taken over parts of provincial China.

Although he mixed with police and served as an official government adviser, Yang’s gang consisted of ex-convicts and other unemployed local men, the court found.

His company, Huayun, had been set up in 1998 to be a front for his criminal activities.

“They illegally possessed guns, ammunition and other firearms, persecuted ordinary citizens and seriously disrupted the local economic and social order,” the court said, convicting him of operating a criminal gang, intimidation, fraud, inciting violence, fighting in public and disorder.

Tangshan is best known for suffering the world’s worst earthquake of the modern era in 1976.

But it has since grown rich on its coal mines and steel factories, which supply much of China heavy industry.

Yang had had “a crush on guns ever since he was a little boy,” reports said.

The case portrayed him as exercising an almost psychopathic control over his “turf”, on one occasion storming into a hospital with his armed posse to threaten a businessman who was a patient by firing twice in the air.

The interview is, technically speaking, utterly motherfucking massive, but here’s what grabs my attention on a late Saturday night.
I wish I could recommend reading this whole interview but it’s mostly excessively boring theoretical discursion about Marxism, just a bunch of name-dropping for more than 50% of this…

De Landa: One of the themes of the War book was the tendency of military organizations to get “humans out of the loop.” Throughout the book (and in my only live lecture to the military) I have very strongly criticized this, urging for the lowering of decision-making thresholds so that soldiers in the field with access to real time information have more power to make decisions than their superiors at the Pentagon. (This theme, of course, goes beyond the military to any kind of centralized decision-making situation, including economic planning.) The problem you raise is, I believe, related to this. If all technological decisions are made centrally without thinking of issues of maintenance in the field, and if there is no incentive for field soldiers to become “grease monkeys” or “hackers,” the army that results is all the more brittle for that. Flexibility implies that knowledge and know-how are not monopolized by central planners but exist in a more decentralized form.

De Landa: All models, by definition, simplify things. Contagion models can be very useful to study certain propagation effects, whether these are fads, fashions or ideas. Can they also be useful to study the propagation of affect? We can’t tell in advance. What is important to see is that even if they turn out to be useless to study violence that does not affect their usefulness in other areas. Also, contagion models differ in the detail with which they portray agency, from completely mechanical models with no agency at all (a homogeneously socialized population) to models in which some form of virtual agent is included. But the key problem is that no one agrees what agency is: must it include some form of rational choice, and if so optimizing or satisfying rationality? Should all psychological effects be eliminated and only inter-subjective effects taken into account? How socialized and obedient should we assume agents to be, and should these qualities be modeled as homogeneously or heterogeneously distributed? Most of these issues have nothing to do with computers and will haunt any modeling effort however informal.

CTHEORY (Mallavarapu): To ask a related question… In your introduction to War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, you take care to point out that your use of the idea of self-organization is “more analogical than mathematical.” What are the problems and possibilities that arise from the use of analogies from chaos science to describe social phenomena?

De Landa: That remark is a disclaimer to draw attention to the fact that one does not have the legitimate right to postulate an “attractor” until one has some mathematical evidence one may be lurking there. (This, by the way, does not imply possession of a formal model. One can infer the presence of an attractor from an analysis of time series, such as those we have for production prices in economics, or voting patterns in political science). The remark in that book was to the effect that I did not model warfare either directly or through time series. That’s the only way one can use these ideas non-metaphorically. (Then, of course, one has to show evidence that the actual physical or social system has an attractor by giving it a push, for example, injecting some energy or spending some money, and checking whether the system returns to its previous state after a while).

An interesting aside on complexity and pet theories:

CTHEORY (Selinger): A few weeks ago I heard Stephen Wolfram give a lecture based on his book A New Kind of Science. There was a performative element to this talk which I found striking.  Have you read this recent book or any of his published material?

De Landa: Though I have not read his recent book, I think his claims have to be wildly exaggerated. In fact, it would seem that each famous scientists in this field would want his own theory or model to be the center of it all. Ilya Prigogine wants everything to be “order through fluctuations”; Roy Bhaskar wants it all to be about self-organized criticality (his sand piles with fractal avalanches); Stuart Kauffmann wants it all to be about “the edge of chaos”, and now of course Wofram wants it all to be about this one CA rule. To me this denies the basic insight of nonlinearity, its plurality of effects. Enrico Fermi once said that to speak of “nonlinear mathematics” made as much sense as to speak of “non-elephant zoology.” In other words, the dichotomy linear-nonlinear is a false one: there are many nonlinear effects and linear ones are one special case of it (so the word nonlinear should eventually disappear). Whenever one opposes chaos and linearity one is bringing back the dichotomy. And so one does when one favors one particular phenomenon at the expense of the large variety of others. Wolfram has done very good work (classifying cellular automata, for example) and his claim to have discovered a special rule is probably serious. But so are the claims by the other scientists I just mentioned.

Interestingly, “social entrainment” as a key leads to chronobiology again!  So far in 2008 I have been awed by how much my “diverse” projects are turning out to be a single, coherent tapestry.  This is probably a sign of increasing self-delusion and dangerous bullshit to come.

Some early dowsing:

Abstract:

Entrainment is a theory of causality wherein different but proximate actants are tied to one another in complementary rhythms. Entrainment proposes a naturalism of interrelatedness. Manuel DeLanda has explored the logic of social entrainment. Opposing assumptions are found in Actor Network Theory. ANT merges the sociology of knowledge and an analysis of power into a theory of pragmatic causality. Social causality is in ANT (micro-) politically constructed. The goal of this paper is to examine entrainment as a generative theory of social construction wherein linkages of ideas, persons, actions, events and objects, unlike in ANT’s translation are not saturated by (principles of) social power. Illustrations of how entrainment and ANT hold up in practice are provided.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm

Infobody Biofeedback Modulation (IBM)

Collective phase entrainment by social force; the tactical formation of the social organism through the control of the economy of imagination and individualized, inner control by local peer pressure. An auto-calibrating distributed believesystem management allowing for necessary agitation and integration on the basis of horizontal conspiracies, co-dependent limited autonomous intelligence.

Most individual social entities are less than well equipped to complete complex tasks, but are functioning well in the context of a social body as a macro-organismic insect population. Individuals might not be able to follow a coherent thought but they are perfectly able to make highly complex calculations regarding your social status in respect to dress-codes, facial expression or nuances in language, by using instinct and being imbedded in an supraintelligent biosystem. This model is in widespread use, although a part of the game is to pretend it is not. The whole being more than the sum of its parts.

The hypothesis of conscious macrobes or social macro-organisms in which individual humans are cells and sub-organisms the organs, seems attractive once a naive belief in solid objects is abandoned. Social organisms are not any less solid than matter itself.

http://www.t0.or.at/0ntext/subprop.htm

Will the Arctic be a 21st Century Sarajevo, triggering a major war over energy resources? Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are at odds over 1.2 million square kilometers (460,000 square miles) of Arctic seabed which could possibly hold 25% of the world’s oil and gas.

Climate change, which is rendering the region increasingly accessible, has upped the ante, making the need for an international resolution of the conflicting claims in the area more pressing. Maritime security and protection of the fragile Arctic ecosystem will also be hot items on the agenda at the May 28 meeting.

The melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet, currently at their lowest levels ever recorded, is happening so fast experts were now questioning whether the situation was close to the tipping point.

The battle lines of future conflict between nations are emerging along the fault lines of the polar ice caps of our planet. An international race for oil, fish, diamonds and shipping routes, is being accelerated by the impact of global warming.

Representatives of the five countries bordering the Arctic will meet at Ilulissat in western Greenland this week to discuss the impact of climate change on the polar region—and how to divide up its as-yet untapped rich resources.

“We must solve our problems peacefully and through accords in line with international law,” said Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, who with the head of the local Greenland government Hans Enoksen, will host the meeting.

The meeting will also be attended by Moeller, Enoksen, Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Norwegian counterpart Jonas Gahr Stoere. The United States will be represented by deputy foreign policy chief John Negroponte.

The rivalry between the five Arctic neighbors has heated up as melting polar ice makes the region more accessible. Scientists saying the Northwest Passage could open up to year-round shipping by 2050.

Denmark and Canada have a longstanding disagreement over who owns the tiny, uninhabited, ice-covered Hans island, which straddles Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island.

Canada and the United States are at odds over the sovereignty of the Northwest Passage that links the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.

Last year, Russian explorers claimed to have planted their national flag at the bottom of the ocean, at a depth of more than 4,000 meters, after an expedition aimed at underlining Moscow’s aspirations to Arctic territory.

That leaves 1.2 million square kilometers of unclaimed territory in an area believed to hold vast petroleum riches.

The UN convention on the Law of the Sea gives countries that are signatories to the treaty the possibility of challenging claims of seabed sovereignty if they want to assert their claims beyond the 200-nautical-mile zone. They have 10 years to do so after ratifying the convention.

All the countries bordering the Arctic have ratified the convention except, of course, the United States, but Moeller said he did not expect the final status of the icy region to be determined until 2022.

In January of 2007 at the opposite end of the planet, a team of Canadian explorers traveled for 47 days from the tip of Antarctica to reach the most remote point of its geographic interior -the “Pole of Inaccessibility” trekking through 250 kilometers – mostly by kiting, using giant kite-sails to pull attached skiers along snowy trails.

When they reached the Pole, they were greeted by a surprising sight – a statue of Vladimir Lenin sticking out two meters above the snow. Lenin’s statue was placed there by Russian explorers in 1958. The discovery of Lenin’s statue might be a foreshadowing of some distant future discovery at the North Pole.

“It is highly probable that Russia’s continental shelf resources may enlarge by 1.2 million square kilometers outside the 200-mile economic zone in the Arctic Ocean. That area may contain 9-10 billion tons of energy resources,” said Natural Resources Ministry’s Institute of World Ocean Geology and Mineral Resources Director Prof. Valery Kamensky.

The new Russian scientific outpost in the Arctic region, North Pole 35, will operate for two years. It is impossible to develop northern areas of Russia, forecast weather and climate changes on this planet and develop hydrocarbons on the continental shelf without a comprehensive study of the Earth ice cap.

“It will take over a year to process the scientific data,” Kamensky said. “The information will come from 35 geological stations, seismic-acoustic monitoring of the 690-kilometer-long Lomonosov Ridge, filming done from an Ilyushin Il-18 aircraft, and deep-water photographs and filming

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea sets the external boundary of a country by the 12-mile zone, while the economic border is limited to 200 miles. Russia will have to prove that its shelf continues the Siberian continental platform in order to enlarge its territory in the Arctic Ocean. The proof may be received by 2009.

The latest report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the ice cap is warming faster than the rest of the planet and ice is receding. It’s a catastrophic scenario for the Arctic ecosystem, for polar bears and other wildlife, and for indiginous populations like the Inuit and the Sami whose ancient cultures depend on frozen waters.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Arctic has as much as 25 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas. Moscow reportedly sees the potential of minerals in its slice of the Arctic sector approaching $2 trillion. Major petroleum companies are now focusing research and exploration on the far north. Russia is developing the vast Shkotman natural gas field off its Arctic coast.

The melting ice cap could open the North Pole region to easy navigation for five months a year, according to the latest Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, revolutionizing shipping the way the Suez Canal did in the 20th Century. Up until recently, reports said it would take 100 years for the ice to melt, but new studies say it could happen in 10-15 years, and the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway have been rushing to stake their claims in the Arctic.

In 2004, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the sovereignty issue “a serious, competitive battle” that “will unfold more and more fiercely.”

If history is a guide, the polar regions may prove to be the catalyst for the next Cold War and a sequel to the original Hunt for the Red October.

Improvised Weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_weapons
Wiki.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/improvised_weap.html
Bruce Schneier.

Network Culture
http://varnelis.net/network_culture

http://nfttu.blogspot.com/
Notes from the Tech Underground—an improvised weapons blog.

http://www.certops.com/certops/certnews.html
Authoritative, slightly creepy prison system news.

http://subtopia.blogspot.com/
Excellent information on urban warfare.

http://donvandergriff.wordpress.com/
This dude is just giving away 5-star material with every post.  Outstanding good stuff.

http://ubiwar.com/category/future-war/
Heavy duty brainfood.  The entire site is worth digging through.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/
Shocker—Wired runs a great blog on military tech.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/
The Harpers of killing people.  Reference library is especially good:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/reference/

http://shloky.com/
“On markets, technology, states and disruptive innovation.” Often too brief but always something cool.

http://www.tdaxp.com/
A living human fountain of important background knowledge and current warfare tech.

http://opposedsystemsdesign.blogsome.com/
Opposed Systems Design—highly informed meta-commentary.

http://www.terraplexic.org/journal/
Complex Terrain Laboratory—interesting and dense material.

I’m a security technologist. My job is making people secure.

I think about security systems and how to break them. Then, how to make them more secure. Computer security systems. Surveillance systems. Airplane security systems and voting machines and RFID chips and everything else.

Cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to tell you that security is fun. It’s incredibly fun. It’s cat and mouse, who can outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. I think it’s the most fun job you can possibly have. If you thought it was fun to read about Marcus outsmarting the gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that.

Working in security means knowing a lot about technology. It might mean knowing about computers and networks, or cameras and how they work, or the chemistry of bomb detection. But really, security is a mindset. It’s a way of thinking. Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He’s always looking for ways a security system fails. I’ll bet he couldn’t walk into a store without figuring out a way to shoplift. Not that he’d do it—there’s a difference between knowing how to defeat a security system and actually defeating it—but he’d know he could.

It’s how security people think. We’re constantly looking at security systems and how to get around them; we can’t help it.

This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you’re on. If you’ve been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you’d better know how to shoplift. If you’re designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you’d better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to design anything good.

So when you’re wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don’t more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don’t, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.

Spend enough time doing this, and you’ll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You’ll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don’t actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You’ll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You’ll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don’t even think about.

Sometimes you’ll notice something about security that no one has ever thought about before. And maybe you’ll figure out a new way to break a security system.

It was only a few years ago that someone invented phishing.

I’m frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security systems. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it’s impossible to prove that something is secure. All you can do is try to break it.—if you fail, you know that it’s secure enough to keep you out, but what about someone who’s smarter than you? Anyone can design a security system so strong he himself can’t break it.

Think about that for a second, because it’s not obvious. No one is qualified to analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will be the same person, with the same limits. Someone else has to analyze the security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn’t think of.

This means that all of us have to analyze the security that other people design. And surprisingly often, one of us breaks it. Marcus’s exploits aren’t far-fetched; that kind of thing happens all the time. Go onto the net and look up Òbump keyÓ or ÒBic pen Kryptonite lockÓ; you’ll find a couple of really interesting stories about seemingly strong security defeated by pretty basic technology.

And when that happens, be sure to publish it on the Internet somewhere. Secrecy and security aren’t the same, even though it may seem that way. Only bad security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it are public.

And publishing vulnerabilities forces security designers to design better security, and makes us all better consumers of security. If you buy a Kryptonite bike lock and it can be defeated with a Bic pen, you’re not getting very good security for your money. And, likewise, if a bunch of smart kids can defeat the DHS’s antiterrorist technologies, then it’s not going to do a very good job against real terrorists.

Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider.

So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.

Bruce Schneier

Afterword by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Xbox Hacker

Hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. It’s in a hacker’s nature to question conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. Any complex system is sport for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker’s natural affinity for problems involving security. Society is a large and complex system, and is certainly not off limits to a little hacking. As a result, hackers are often stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for the sake of defiance. When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and tunnels at MIT.

Unfortunately, the combination of not complying with social norms and knowing “threatening” things like how to read the arphid on your credit card or how to pick locks causes some people to fear hackers. However, the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as “I’m an engineer because I like to design things.” People often ask me, “Why did you hack the Xbox security system?” And my answer is simple: First, I own the things that I buy. If someone can tell me what I can and can’t run on my hardware, then I don’t own it. Second, because it’s there. It’s a system of sufficient complexity to make good sport. It was a great diversion from the late nights working on my PhD.

I was lucky. The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people. However, the right to hack shouldn’t only be extended to academics. I got my start on hacking when I was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every electronic appliance I could get my hands on, much to my parents’ chagrin. My reading collection included books on model rocketry, artillery, nuclear weaponry and explosives manufacture—books that I borrowed from my school library (I think the Cold War influenced the reading selection in public schools). I also played with my fair share of ad-hoc fireworks and roamed the open construction sites of houses being raised in my Midwestern neighborhood. While not the wisest of things to do, these were important experiences in my coming of age and I grew up to be a free thinker because of the social tolerance and trust of my community.

Current events have not been so kind to aspiring hackers. Little Brother shows how we can get from where we are today to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies altogether. A recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the line into the world of Little Brother. I had the fortune of reading an early draft of Little Brother back in November 2006. Fast forward two months to the end of January 2007, when Boston police found suspected explosive devices and shut down the city for a day. These devices turned out to be nothing more than circuit boards with flashing LEDs, promoting a show for the Cartoon Network. The artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to shell out a $2 million settlement, and the head of the Cartoon Network resigned over the fallout.