Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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Scotland under cyber attack?

Published by peter on 2013-02-03 in Cyber security, History and Politics. 0 Comments

In the past, global empires such as those of Rome or Britain or France could face attacks from anywhere across the empire.   Britain, for instance, fought Imperial wars in Southern Africa and Afghanistan.   The Internet takes us back to that situation – any country, no matter how small or obscure, potentially faces cyber espionage or incursions or attacks from people anywhere in the world.   Ask Estonia or Denmark, both small countries that came under attack from cyber attackers.
The Roman Empire never did manage to subdue the belligerent peoples in what is now Scotland.   How ironic, then, that Scots nationalists seem not to have realized that an independent nation will need to defend itself from global attack.   MP Rory Stewart has reminded them, asking some hard, clear-light-of-day, questions about the romantic, candle-lit, vision of Scottish independence.   Questioning Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, who was appearing before the UK House of Commons Committee on Foreign Affairs, Stewart asked about independent Scotland’s plans for intelligence and security:

Sturgeon came under repeated pressure from the Tory MP for Penrith and the Border, Rory Stewart, a former army officer and Foreign Office diplomat, to explain how an independent Scotland would build, equip, train and fund its own spying and security services.
Stewart said the UK’s current annual spying and security budget did not include the total historic costs of building and equipping its intelligence services, from setting up secure intelligence units in overseas embassies, training its agents, to building and equipping GCHQ.
It would cost billions, he said, to set up the secure communications Scotland needed for its intelligence agencies. For instance, if an independent Scotland wanted to have the same number of embassies overseas as Ireland, which has 97, or Finland, which has 93, it would cost hundreds of millions to equip them.”

Public appearances

Published by peter on 2013-01-15 in Culture and Politics. 0 Comments

I have argued before that it is an abuse of power for major newspapers to run obituaries of obscure back-office staff, simply because they can.   This is an abuse since a newspaper is a public organization, playing a very public role in public life,  not some private family newsletter shared, like samizdat, between close relatives over kitchen coffee.
The Guardian now runs, as the cover story in its Saturday Review section, extracts from the piano-learning diary of its Editor, Alan Rusbridger.    Perhaps there is nothing actually unethical about a major newspaper running long cover stories about its Editor’s private hobbies, and promoting his new book.  But one has to ask:   Is The Guardian now the private family newsletter of its Editor?

Eric the Red

Published by peter on 2012-12-23 in History and Politics. Closed

Journalist Neal Ascherson recounts his first encounter with historian Eric Hobsbawm, who publicly insulted him as a new undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge in the early 1950s before Hobsbawm apparently even knew his name:

I lurched up a dark wooden stairway into a room full of chattering, laughing young men (no women, I noticed) and was handed more wine. Presently a lean, bespectacled man with fairish hair came over to me, with a few students drifting up behind him. One of them I vaguely recognised, an American, but I didn’t know his name.
Eric inspected me. A specimen, indeed.
“What’s that medal affair you’re wearing?”
“It’s my national service campaign medal. For active service in the Malayan emergency.”
Eric pulled back and took another look at me. Then he said, very sharply but without violence: “Malaya? You should be ashamed to be wearing that.”
I don’t think I said anything at all. I remember noticing the students around us, round-eyed with shock. Then I left the room, stumbling back down the dusky stairs, and out into the huge court where it was beginning to rain.

And the American?  Daniel Ellsberg!  Of course it was.  Of course.
I am reminded of that old joke about time being God’s way of preventing everything happening at once, while space is His way of preventing everything happening at Cambridge.

Memory

Published by peter on 2012-12-10 in Heroes, History and Politics. 0 Comments

We keep books because they are personal souvenirs of the past – physical reminders of the feelings we had while reading them.  The same goes for concert programs and tickets for sporting events, which many people keep.     As more of our life goes online, we risk losing such souvenirs.  Only the online record itself may provide a long-term reminder of something, or someone.
On the other hand, the web makes it vastly easier to bring to wide attention something or someone who should be remembered.  In the early days of photography, photographers recorded memorable events, such as weddings and Presidential inaugurations.  Susan Sontag noticed that something changed as photography ceased to be only done by professionals and became a democratic pastime: the relationship between events and photographs switched.  Now events were memorable (and remembered) precisely because they had been photographed.   The web is effecting the same reversal, I believe.
I can record a person of great influence on my life, who would otherwise be entirely forgotten to history, or people whom I never met, but whose words and actions have affected mine, for example, the activist-poets Vadim Delone, or Robert Southwell.  I can record people who think differently to the verbal paradigm which so dominates contemporary western culture – the  matherati, say, or musical thinkers.   I can even use the Web to find and trace the genealogy of some of my own musical thinking, say, and then record for posterity these cross-generational networks of connections.  Since so much of written history is by definition written by people au fait with language-based thought, it is particularly important that minority, non-language thinkers are not forgotten. (Many more people know, for instance, of the writers of Japanese haiku poetry in the Edo period than do of the ordinary people who solved temple geometry problems, the Sangaku.)
The souvenirs I mention above are mostly personal, perhaps of little interest to anyone else.  The same became true of photographs, early in their adoption.  The Web also lets us record for posterity events and people of much wider significance.   Perhaps the best recent example I know is Normblog’s admirable and riveting series of Holocaust stories, Figures from a Dark Time.  Apparently not everyone agrees that this series is worth doing.  Let me add my strong opinion that this recording is both necessary and important, and we should all be very grateful for Norm’s efforts.  After 9/11, the New York Times published short obituaries of every person killed in the attack.    Although it may be too late, we should be aiming for the same in remembering the Holocaust.

Conservatives for Bam

Published by peter on 2012-10-23 in Politics. 0 Comments

Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama, after last-night’s Presidential Debate:

After eight years of the most disastrous, misguided, immoral and a catastrophic foreign policy, Obama has brought the US back from the brink, presided over the decimation of al Qaeda, the liberation of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and restored America’s moral standing in the world.
. . .
But this was Obama’s debate; and he reminded me again of how extraordinarily lucky this country has been to have had him at the helm in this new millennium.
He’s flawed; he’s made mistakes; but who hasn’t? If this man, in these times, with this record, against this opposition, does not deserve re-election, then I am simply at a loss for words. I have to believe the American people will see that in time.”

Coates on Bam

Published by peter on 2012-09-01 in Culture, Heroes, Obama speeches and Politics. 0 Comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a superb and insightful essay on black and white perceptions of Barack Obama as President and as a black American in a country that experienced 175 years of white affirmative action.  The common phrase describing what black Americans need to be for success in white society is:  twice as good and half as black.
 

You have to make the case!

Published by peter on 2012-08-16 in Decision theory, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Former conservative Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (who, by the by, has long been an admirer of Ayn Rand), together with former Secretary of the Australian Commonwealth Department for Defence, Paul Barratt, and former Australian Defence Forces Chief, General Peter Gration, has called for a public inquiry regarding the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.   As I noted at the time, what was truly remarkable was the complete unwillingness of any of the principal decision-makers  – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair or Howard – to publicly justify their decision, a decision taken before August 2002, until very late in the day.    So severe was this reticence on John Howard’s part that the Australian Senate – for the first and so far only time in its history – passed a censure  motion against the Prime Minister for his refusal to explain or justify his decision.  It seems that Fraser, Barratt, Gration, et al., are still waiting for those particular dogs to bark.
As I said at the time, there could be good and compelling reasons for a Government to not publicly justify a military decision.  If so, one would have expected the principals at least to explain the reasons for their reticence to other friendly Governments, even if only in private.  It is noteworthy then to recall Joschka Fischer’s public beration of Donald Rumsfeld:  “You have to make the case!” (video here).   Even the German Foreign Minister, it seems, could not be trusted by the decision-makers with either an explanation of the invasion decision or an explanation as to why no explanation could be given.  After all this time of dogs still quiet, one is led increasingly to the conclusion that the real reason for the decision was something that ill-behooved or shamed the decision-makers.

Recent reading 5

Published by peter on 2012-08-01 in Books, Computer Science, Concats, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Music, Politics and Recent Reading. 0 Comments

A list, sometimes annotated, of books recently read:

  • Richard Bassett [2012]: Hitler’s Spy Chief. New York: Pegasus. A biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. This book appears to be a reissue (also revised?) of a book first published in 2005. The subject and argument of the book are fascinating, but sadly this is not matched by the writing, which is just appalling.

    The first problem is with the status of the book. The inside cover pages say “copyright 2011”, and “First Pegasus Books hardcover edition 2012”, yet the Acknowledgements section is dated 2004. Various references to contemporary events throughout the book also indicate a date of writing of around 2003 or so. The front section contains a “Preface to the American Edition” which is undated, but cites letters written in 2008 and 2009. The author’s sloppiness with dates is manifest throughout the book, and it is often very hard for a reader to determine exactly which year events being described actually happened.

    A further great sloppiness concerns the use of names – many people, like citizens of Indonesia, appear only to have surnames. Later references will often find a first name attached to the surname – is this the same person, one wonders? It is as if the author assumes we know as much as he seems to know about minor Nazi officials, and temporary clerks in MI6.

    The book actually reads like the author’s narrative notes for a book rather than the book itself, with much background information missing or assumed to be known by the reader. Is this his first draft perhaps, ready for editing? How could one write on the topic of German foreign intelligence in WW II without discussion of the XX Committee, for example? Admittedly, the author does make one single reference to this operation (on page 280, out of 296 pages of text), but with no explanation of what the committee was doing or an evaluation of its work, and not even a listing in the index. And given the author’s argument that Canaris was an internal opponent of Hitler from before the start of WW II, then an analysis of the alleged success of the XX operations in outwitting Nazi intelligence is surely needed here. Was Canaris complicit in these operations, for example? Especially if, as the author believes, Canaris met with his British opposite number, Sir Stewart Menzies, during WW II.

    And like a person too eager to please, the author’s sentences run on and on and on, with clause after subordinate clause, each introducing a new topic or change or direction, or dropping yet another name, in some drunken word association game. Where were the editors when this book was submitted? On vacation? On strike? Reading the book requires a reader to fight past the author’s appalling prose style to reach the interesting content. Sadly, Admiral Canaris still awaits a good English-language biography.

    The book makes a very strong claim, which is not supported by the citation given by Bassett. On page 167, we read:

    “in Finland where the British forces sent to help the Finns against the Soviets in 1940 were actually assisted in their passage by the Germans. German air and land forces were instructed not to interfere with the progress of these British forces.”

    For this very bold claim, Bassett cites Frederick Winterbotham, The Nazi Connection, p. 164 (London 1978). But Winterbotham’s book seems to have nothing about the Winter War. Finland is not even in the index.

    Basset also cites Winterbotham for a claim that Luftwaffe General Milch visited the Royal Air Force in Britain before the war. However, none of the pages of Winterbotham’s book which mention Milch say this.

  • Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman [2012]:  Spies Against Armageddon:  Inside Israel’s Secret Wars. Levant Books.
  • Milton Bearden and James Risen [2004]: The Main Enemy:  The Insider Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB.  Presidio Press.
  • Natalie Dykstra [2012]:  Clover Adams:  A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.   An intelligent and sympathetic life of Marian (“Clover”) Hooper Adams (1843-1885), pioneer of art photography, wife of Henry Adams, and a daughter of transcendentalist poet, Ellen Sturgis Hooper.   She was a friend and muse to Henry James, and a distant relative of the step-family of George Santayana.
  • Archie Brown [2010]:  The Rise and Fall of Communism.  Vintage.
  • James Douglass [2008]:   JFK and the Unspeakable:  Why he Died and Why it Matters. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
  • Sidney Ploss [2009]:  The Roots of Perestroika:  The Soviet Breakdown in Historical Context. McFarland and Company.
  • David Maraniss [2012]:  Barack Obama:  The Story.  Simon and Schuster.
  • Ben MacIntyre [2012]: Double Cross:  The True Story of the D-Day Spies.  London: Bloomsbury. Reviewed here.
  • Colin Eatock [2009]: Mendelssohn and Victorian England.  London: Ashgate.  A detailed and comprehensive account of Mendelssohn’s visits to England (and his one visit to Scotland), and his activities, musical and other, while there.
  • George Dyson [2012]:  Turing’s Cathedral:  The Origins of the Digital Universe.  Allen Lane.   A fascinating account of the involvement of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, in the early development of scientific computing, led by that larger-than-life character, Johnnie von Neumann.
  • Gordon Brook-Shepherd [1988]: The Storm Birds:  Soviet Post-War Defectors.  Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • Neil Sheehan [2010]:  A Fiery Peace in a Cold War:  Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon. Vintage Books.  A fascinating history of the US inter-continental ballistic missile program in the 1950s, told through a biography of one of its parents, USAF General Bennie Schriever.    It is easy to forget how much practical expertise was needed for successful missile and satellite launches, as with any new and complex technology.   As a consequence, we forget how few of the early test launch attempts were successful.  The Vanguard 3 rocket, for example, launched just 3 satellites out of 11 attempts between December 1957 and September 1959. (Vanguard was a USN project.)

Krugman speaking truth to power

Published by peter on 2012-06-05 in Economics and Politics. 0 Comments

When the economic history of the Great Global Recession of 2007- ? comes eventually to be written, let it be recorded that many of us were profoundly opposed from the outset to the economic austerity policies pursued by Governments and central banks in Europe and elsewhere. Not only are these policies selfish, class-based, and unfair, they are also ineffective. Those of us who had heard of Keynes knew they would be ineffective before they were tried. In the case of the “rescue” of southern and peripheral Europe by northern European troikas, they are also being imposed undemocratically and unfairly, rewarding northern European private investors and bank shareholders at the expense of ordinary southern European citizens. (The effective interest rates on troika loans to Greece, which are much higher than current market rates, are truly rapacious.)
Only a handful of economists in this period are speaking truth to power. The most prominent of these is Paul Krugman. He has nailed the bastards again, in this oped article last week. Some excerpts:

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?
The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.”

Krugman could also have added that most families, unlike Governments, cannot increase their income by increasing their spending.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.
This isn’t a new insight. The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.” Recent events, above all the austerity death spiral in Europe, have dramatically illustrated the truth of Fisher’s insight.
And there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.
As I said, this isn’t a new insight. So why have so many politicians insisted on pursuing austerity in slump? And why won’t they change course even as experience confirms the lessons of theory and history?
Well, that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”
Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.
And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describing Ireland as “a shining example of the art of the possible.” Meanwhile, the Cato Institute was praising Iceland’s low taxes and hoping that other industrial nations “will learn from Iceland’s success.”
So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.
In fairness to Britain’s conservatives, they aren’t quite as crude as their American counterparts. They don’t rail against the evils of deficits in one breath, then demand huge tax cuts for the wealthy in the next (although the Cameron government has, in fact, significantly cut the top tax rate). And, in general, they seem less determined than America’s right to aid the rich and punish the poor. Still, the direction of policy is the same — and so is the fundamental insincerity of the calls for austerity.
The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.”

XX Foxiness: Counter-espionage

Published by peter on 2012-04-15 in Decision theory, Game theory, Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage and Politics. 0 Comments

I have just read Ben MacIntyre’s superb “Double Cross:  The True Story of the D-Day Spies” (Bloomsbury, London 2012), which describes the succesful counter-espionage operation conducted by the British against the Nazis in Britain during WW II.  Every Nazi foreign agent in Britain was captured and either tried and executed, or turned, being run by the so-called Twenty (“XX”) Committee.  This network of double agents, many of whom created fictional sub-agents, became a secret weapon of considerable power, able to mislead and misdirect  Nazi war efforts through their messages back to their German controllers (in France, Portugal, Spain and Germany).
The success of these misdirections was known precisely, since Britain was able to read most German encrypted communications, through the work of Bletchley Park (the Enigma project).  Indeed, since the various German intelligence controllers often simply passed on the messages they received from their believed-agents in Britain verbatim (ie, without any summarization or editing),  these message helped the decoders decipher each German daily cypher code:  the decoders had both the original message sent from Britain and its encrypted version communicated between German intelligence offices in (say) Lisbon and Berlin.
This secret weapon was used most famously to deflect Nazi attentions from the true site of the D-Day landings in France.  So successful was this, with entire fictional armies created and reported on in South East England and in Scotland (for purported attacks on Calais in France and on Norway), that even after the war’s end, former Nazi military leaders talked about the non-use by allies of these vast forces, still not realizing the fiction.
One interesting question is the extent to which parts of German intelligence were witting or even complicit in this deception.  The Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, under its leader Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (who led it 1935-1944), was notoriously anti-Nazi.  Indeed, many of its members were arrested for plotting against Hitler.  Certainly, if not witting or complicit, many of its staff were financially corrupt, and happy to take a percentage of payments made to agents they knew or suspected to be fictional.
Another fascinating issue is when it may not be good to know something:  One Abwehr officer, Johnny Jebsen, remained with them while secretly talking to the British about defecting.   The British could not, of course, know where his true loyalties lay while he remained with the Abwehr.   Despite their best efforts to stop him, he told them of all the German secret agents then working in Britain.  They tried to stop him because once he told them, he knew that they knew who the Germans believed their agents to be.  Their subsequent reactions to having this knowledge  – arrest each agent or leave the agent in place – would thus tell him which agents were really working for the Nazis and which were in fact double agents.
Jebsen was drugged and forcibly returned to Germany by the Abwehr (apparently, to pre-empt him being arrested by the SS and thus creating an excuse for the closure of the Abwehr), and then was tortured, sent to a concentration camp, and probably murdered by the Nazis.  It seems he did not reveal anything of what he knew about the British deceptions, and withstood the torture very bravely.  MacIntyre rightly admires him as one of the unsung heroes of this story.
Had Jebsen been able to defect to Britain, as others did, the British would have faced the same quandary that later confronted both CIA and KGB with each defecting espionage agent during the Cold War:  Is this person a genuine defector or a plant by the other side?  I have talked before about some of the issues for what to believe, what to pretend to believe, and what to do in the case of KGB defector (and IMHO likely plant) Yuri Nosenko, here and here.