Category: history

…and give reasons in writing

Cold War nuts should follow Mike Kenner’s Twitter feed if they’re not already. His key shtick is getting interesting documents under FOIA and tweeting them bit by bit. This week, he’s got the national war instructions for the police, from 1977, codenamed POLWIN.

This is some pretty bleak stuff, obviously; I can’t imagine instructions on the administration of justice after a nuclear attack issuing from the Regional Commissioner’s office holding out much hope of justice, or indeed being issued in the first place.

But the really interesting thing is how much of the police mobilisation plan in the event of an ultimate existential crisis eventually got implemented.

For example, the familiar PSU (Police Support Unit) serials are a war-book measure in the 1977 instructions, and the to-do list in Section 8 of the instructions includes activating your coach hire contracts and earmarking the vans to move the PSUs out, and this is mentioned in the context of the police mutual-aid plan.

That’s just tactics, but Section 7.4 deals with what was to be done with people whose loyalty was suspected. Once the emergency defence regulations went into force, the Secretary of State would make Restriction Orders on named individuals which would permit him (in 1977 it was Merlyn Rees) to lock them up, assign them to a place of residence, place limits on what possessions they could have, and what employment they might take up.

MI5 would make recommendations to the minister, with the odd exception of IRA suspects, who would be suggested to the minister by the Met Commissioner. The police would put this in effect on the ground, and the instructions provide for very detailed arrangements including five copies (one spare) of an arrest form, specimen blank provided. Suspects placed under arrest would be conveyed to HM Prison, the specific prison to be notified to the Chief Constable with the list of suspects. There, they would be booked in, and provided by the Prison Governor with a copy of the Restriction Order giving reasons for their detention.

I think it is very noticeable that today, in nothing like the circumstances foreseen in POLWIN, we are doing most of this…but we don’t always tell the suspect why! Post-liberal future, how are ya.

On the other hand, even in the Ultimate Crisis, British police would still have gone largely unarmed.

Anyway, if you want to dig into the document, the index pages are here and here. (Kenner is also a serious FOIA-ninja; although, in principle, the document had been declassified, police forces had also been told to dispose of their copy rather than send it to the National Archives. Dorset plod apparently forgot.)

How the Scottish Labour party got telecoms policy right in 1895

Via someone on twatter, Parliament debates telecoms regulation, in 1895. The superficial bit:

there was a great distinction between telephones and such subjects as gas and water. Gas and water were necessaries for every inhabitant of the country; telephones were not and never would be. It was no use trying to persuade themselves that the use of telephones could be enjoyed by the large masses of the people in their daily life. [An hon. MEMBER: "America."]

He did not think his hon. Friend was aware of the fact that in the large towns of America subscribers had to pay £40 to £50 for the service which a subscriber in London obtained for from £10 to £20. He went further and said that in a town like London, or Glasgow, or Belfast, an effective telephone service would be practically impossible if the large majority of the houses were furnished with telephones, so great would be the confusion caused by the increased number of exchanges. He was not stating his own opinion, but that of experts.

You’ve got to love the appeal to nameless experts there, and the general 640K-ness. But there’s more, and as this evening’s unstated theme is turning out to be “blog about why things everybody agrees on don’t get on the ballot”, it’s worth reading on.

For a start, they’re debating the question of whether cities ought to be allowed to run their own networks, a topic which is just as fresh today as it was then. Everyone agrees that a private-sector monopoly is undesirable, but is the answer muni-fibre (well, muni-copper), regulation and a universal-service fund, a nationalised industry, or something else? The minister, Arnold Morley, argues that it’s mostly a national-level or even supranational (he says imperial) infrastructure issue. Glasgow Labour MP A. C. Corbett makes a vigorous case for municipal socialism in telephony as in everything else. Sir J.E. Gorst sketches out the situation, which is almost as much of a mess as UK telecoms policy is now. A good row is fought out about who is responsible.

A. D. Provand, yet another Glasgow MP, invents settlement-free peering 100 years early and points up the difference between peering and termination:

The terminals would operate in this way: If, for example, London had a telephone licence, it could not send a message to Brighton unless Brighton had also an exchange, which would deliver the message free, otherwise the London message would he delivered through the present Company at Brighton, which would charge a terminal for doing so, The effect of that would lie to double the rate between London and Brighton.

And A.C. Corbett basically hits on the solution everybody who’s seriously thought about it prefers: open access to shared civil infrastructure! But why put up with the open access bit when the town hall can run the whole thing?

It had been suggested that where underground telephones were necessary, and where it was impossible for the municipality to entrust the control of the streets to any private corporation working for profit, that the municipality should lay these underground wires and take all the care of them. If the municipality was to lay the wires and take all the care of maintenance, there was no possible reason why the municipality should not take over all the undertaking and derive all the profit to be got from it.

Then again, once you’ve got the rights-of-way and the ducts in the public hand, you can do both, like Singapore’s NBN.

Well, at least we were spared the private sector monopoly…until we got it anyway. It is pretty astonishing, though, when you think of some of the places that have got 150Mbps FTTH networks and some of the places that have already sorted out LTE spectrum, and then of the UK. Agenda-setting is a powerful force.

From bad to worse: against the decline narrative

So I’ve been reading books. Books! One of them being David Edgerton’s Britain’s War Machine, his industrial history of the British Empire in the second world war. This is fascinating, in terms of hardware (especially ships), politics, and also national mythology. Edgerton is very hard on the decline historians, especially and specifically Corelli Barnett, and argues that far from going into the war with a plastic fork, a few Spitfires, and the best of British, the UK was actually by far the richest and strongest combatant and the best prepared for a war that everyone expected would be defined by production, blockade, and air warfare. He is interesting on the surge of industrialisation around the empire, the weirdness of British statistics (did you know that government cargo, i.e. absolutely anything shipped to or from the armed forces, was simply not counted in the import and export numbers?), the challenge of optimising the entire economy to save shipping space, and especially on the politics of expertise. How, for example, did we come to believe that the UK didn’t really do science until, in desperation, it turned to left-wing experts, when the Churchill government probably contained more scientists and engineers than any other before or since and most of them were Tories?

But it left me wanting a book that’s not been written yet. That book is Decline – From Bad to Worse, the History of a Cliche. It strikes me that British politics, especially, is always obsessed by decline, and in ways that show up interesting partisan divides. Show me your narrative of decline, and I’ll show you the inside of your head.

For example, a very common one is that British industry basically sucks and started doing so at some time in the late 19th century because it wasn’t enough like the Germans, and as a result things got gradually worse until the Germans beat us with science, or rather, engineering, in 1940. At this point, there’s a divergence.

There is a narrative of the Left in which the Labour Party enters the government and forces them to reorganise the country on scientific lines, bringing in the experts to fix industry and invent the computer, setting up a welfare state and a public sector bank like the one the Germans had, and deploying state-of-the-art IS/LM diagrams to manage the economy. Depending on which kind of lefty you are, you then argue that sadly, this was never fully put into effect due to Tories, the City, or perhaps the unions, or else you argue that it was fundamentally flawed due to either the Empire or the Americans or some combination of both.

There is an alternative version of this, popularised by Corelli Barnett, that keeps the content and reverses the sign – we need and needed to be more like the Germans, but the obstruction is stupid Tories and then Labour spending all the money on Keynes Plans. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile how Barnett wanted more technical training, R&D and big science, and workplace mitbestimmung, and still loathed Clement Attlee quite so much, but then partisanship is a powerful force.

This has an extreme variant, popular at Cambridge in the 1980s, in which the point is carried further. Not only did we need to be more like the Germans, we needed to be more like the Nazis and indeed to have been their allies. Unsurprisingly this isn’t very popular, but it exists and you wonder about some people. (Fill them in here, in this empty space: )

There is a logical problem with all these, which is that they’re talking about “relative decline” and trying to draw practical or moral consequences for our own behaviour. But the main cause of relative decline is that someone else industrialised, and there’s no way in which being more like the Germans would stop the Germans from being like the Germans.

There is a Tory narrative of decline in which we’ve thrown it all away through moral corruption, of one kind or another. This could be inflation, or socialism, or modernist buildings, or really anything. Skilled practitioners, like Roger Scruton or many successive leader writers in the Times, can detect this in absolutely any field of human action and on absolutely any evidence and come up with the same policy prescriptions.

This one is important because it taps right into the core narrative of decline running through Western culture. Anywhere you go in Europe or anywhere it has ever influenced, you’ll find someone on the right of politics who thinks Things Are Not What They Were. Decline: From Bad to Worse would really be about this.

There is another narrative, which can be on either side of politics, in which decline is pervasive and also just. Rather than simply succumbing to tragic cultural entropy, as above, we are declining because the past was a falsehood, a pyrites age. This is fairly common on the Left with regard to the empire, and on the Right with regard to the era, five minutes before they last got elected, when the streets weren’t full of beggars. Either way, it’s punishment and we deserve it. It’s possible that this represents a Protestant form of decline and the one before a Catholic one.

In practice, decline can be either a reason why We Can’t Have Nice Things, a justification for change (in the hope of reversing it), or a justification for repression (to stop it getting any worse).

Lurking technology

Recently, preparing a case study for a client, I was struck by the idea of a “lurking technology”. (The history of technology is the trade secret of IT consulting, or something.) That’s one that isn’t necessarily obviously linked to the end user, has broad influence, and causes changes to happen. You can make a case that Ethernet was such a thing for the media in the 1980s and 1990s – the new colour print machines, the Apple Macs in the layout department, and the faxes and WAN technologies supporting the reporters are all influential in themselves, but they wouldn’t have worked without good local area networking to tie them together. You could say something similar about finance, and taken together, there’s a case that its influence has been mostly evil:-)

But the one I fixed on was distributed version-control. (I thought of Whitworth’s screw-originating machine, but I felt it might be a bit recondite.) It’s easy enough to see that there are a hell of a lot of Linux/Apache/MySQL/programming language beginning with P servers out there, and an absolutely enormous number of Android devices, to say nothing of BSD Unix-based iPhones. And it’s even easier to crack out 800 shiny radical words on the joy of open source.

However, just remember the last time you circulated a document for comment around a dozen people and what a pain in the arse that was. Now scale up to a million lines of code and several hundred contributors distributed around the world, and require that every change be submitted to automated testing, and imagine just how much pain and trouble and time this is going to involve.

The lurking technology that fixes this, and makes it possible, is distributed version control. Like all lurking technologies, very few people really care, a few more master it as part of a trade, and a bigger pool just assume it’s there. Of course, the people who do care over-care and imagine you could just sling the statute book in Github, and of course they are wrong, as a real expert points out here.

The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure

So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice documents. Basically, it was a site where the phone company took calls from the public, either for its own account or on behalf of a third party. Its practices were defined by Bell System standardisation, and its industrial relations were defined by the agreement between AT&T and the unions, which specified the pay and conditions for the various trades and workplace types inside the monster telco. If something was a Business Office according to the book, the union agreement covering those offices would apply.

In the Reaganite 80s, after the Bell System was broken up, someone realised that it would be possible to get rid of the union rules if they could re-define the site as something else. Not only could they change the rules, but they could move the site physically to a right-to-work state or even outside the USA. This is, it turns out, the origin of the phrase “call centre”.

In the UK, of course, call centres proliferated in parallel with utility privatisation and financial deregulation. A major element in the business case for privatisation was getting rid of all those electricity showrooms and BT local offices and centralising customer service functions into `all centres. At the same time, of course, privatisation created the demand for customer service in that it was suddenly possible to change provider and therefore to generate a shit-load of admin. Banks were keen to get rid of their branches and to serve the hugely expanding credit card market. At another level, IT helpdesks made their appearance.

On the other hand, hard though it is to imagine it now, there was a broader vision of technology that expected it all to be provided centrally – in the cloud, if you will – down phone lines controlled by your favourite telco, or by the French Government, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is one of the futures that didn’t happen, of course, because PCs and the web happened instead, but you can bet I spent a lot of time listening to people as late as the mid-2000s still talking about multimedia services (and there are those who argue this is what stiffed Symbian). But we do get a sneak-preview of the digital future that Serious People wanted us to have, every time we have to ring the call centre. In many ways, call centres are the Anti-Web.

In Britain, starting in the 1990s, they were also part of the package of urban regeneration in the North. Along with your iconic eurobox apartments and AutoCAD-shaped arts centre, yup, you could expect to find a couple of gigantic decorated sheds full of striplighting and the precariat. Hey, he’s like a stocky, Yorkshire Owen Hatherley. After all, it was fairly widely accepted that even if you pressed the button marked Arts and the money rolled in, there was a limit to the supply of yuppies and there had to be some jobs in there as well.

You would be amazed at the degree of boosterism certain Yorkshire councils developed on this score, although you didn’t need top futurist Popcorn Whatsname to work out that booming submarine cable capacity would pretty quickly make offshoring an option. Still, if Bradford didn’t make half-arsed attempts to jump on every bandwagon going, leaving it cluttered with vaguely Sicilian failed boondoggles, it wouldn’t be Bradford.

Anyway, I think I’ve made a case that this is an institution whose history has been pathological right from the start. It embodies a fantasy of managing a service industry in the way the US automakers were doing at the same time – and failing, catastrophically.

The politics of call centres, part one

What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone and Thames Water were the best, npower and Virgin Media the worst.) But this isn’t just going to be a consumer whine. In an economy that is over 70% services, the combination of service design, technology, and social relations that makes these things so awful is something we need to understand.

For example, why does E.ON (the electricity company, a branch of the German utility Rhein-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke) want you to tell their IVR what class you are before they do anything else? This may sound paranoid, but when I called them, the first question I had to answer was whether I owned my home or was a tenant. What on earth did they want to know that for?

Call centres provide a horrible experience to the user. They are famously awful workplaces. And they are also hideously inefficient – some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls. Manufacturing industry has long recognised that rework is the greatest enemy of productivity, taking up disproportionate amounts of time and resources and inevitably never quite fixing the problems.

So why are they so awful? Well, I’ll get to that in the next post. Before we can answer that, we need to think about how they are so awful. I’ve made a list of anti-patterns – common or standard practices that embody error – that make me angry.

Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.

Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user – because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan’s terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you’re providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.

And the existence of the queue is important in the social relations of the workplace. If there are people queueing, it is obviously essential to get to them as soon as possible, which means there is a permanent pressure to speed up the line. Many centres use the queue as an operational KPI. It is also quality-destroying, in that both workers and managers’ attention is always focused on the next call and how to get off the current call in order to get after the queue.

A related issue is polling. That is to say, repeatedly checking on something, rather than being informed pro-actively when it changes. This is of course implicit in the queueing model. It represents a waste of time for everyone involved.

Repetition is one of the most annoying of the anti-patterns, and it is caused by statelessness. It is always assumed that this interaction has never happened before, will never happen again, and is purely atomised. They don’t know what happened in the last call, or even earlier in the call if it has been transferred. As a result, you have to provide your mother’s maiden name and your account number, again, and they have to retype it, again. The decontextualised nature of interaction with a call centre is one of the worst things about it.

Pretty much every phone system these days uses SIP internally, so there is no excuse for not setting a header with a unique identifier that could be used to look up data in all the systems involved, and indeed given out as a ticket number to the user in case they need to call again, or – why not – used to share the record of the call.

That point leads us to another very important one. Assymetric legibility characterises call centres, and it’s dreadful. Within, management tries to maintain a panopticon glare at the staff. Without, the user faces an unmapped territory, in which the paths are deliberately obscure, and the details the centre holds on you are kept secret. Call centres know a lot about you, but won’t say; their managers endlessly spy on the galley slaves; you’re not allowed to know how the system works.

So no wonder we get failure demand, in which people keep coming back because it was so awful last time. A few companies get this, and use first-call resolution (the percentage of cases that are closed first time) as a KPI rather than call rates, but you’d be surprised. Obviously, first-call resolution has a whole string of social implications – it requires re-skilling of the workforce and devolution of authority to them. No wonder it’s rare.

Now, while we were in the queue, the robot voice kept telling us to bugger off and try the Web site. But this is futile. Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you’re in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required.

However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.

So, there’s the how. Now for the why.

Can you hear me now?

Well, here’s a contribution to the debate over the riots. The Thin Blue Trots’…sorry…Police Federation report has been leaked.

Among the failings highlighted by the federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were “always approximately half an hour behind the rioters”. This partly explained, it said, why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on.

The Airwave network was supposed to improve the way emergency services in London responded to a crisis after damning criticism for communication failures following the 7 July bombings in 2005.

It is being relied upon to ensure that police officers will be able to communicate with each other from anywhere in Britain when the Olympics come to London next summer. The federation wants a review into why the multibillion-pound system collapsed, leaving officers to rely on their own phones.

“Officers on the ground and in command resorted, in the majority, to the use of personal mobile phones to co-ordinate a response,” says the report.

It sounds like BB Messenger over UMTS beats shouting into a TETRA voice radio, as it should being about 10 years more recent. Not *this* crap again!

There’s surely an interesting story about how the UK managed to fail to procure a decent tactical radio for either its army or its civilian emergency services in the 1990s and 2000s. Both the big projects – the civilian (mostly) one that ended up as Airwave and the military one that became BOWMAN – were hideously troubled, enormously overbudget, and very, very late. Neither product has been a great success in service. And it was a bad time for slow procurement as the rapid technological progress (from 9.6Kbps circuit-switched data on GSM in 1998 to 7.2Mbps HSPA in 2008, from Ericsson T61s in 2000 to iPhones in 2008) meant that a few years would leave you far behind the curve.

And it’s the UK, for fuck’s sake. We do radio. At the same time, Vodafone and a host of M4-corridor spin-offs were radio-planning the world. Logica’s telecoms division, now Acision, did its messaging centres. ARM and CSR and Cambridge Wireless were designing the chips. Vodafone itself, of course, was a spinoff from Racal, the company that sold army radios for export because the official ones were ones nobody would import in a fit. BBC Research’s experience in making sure odd places in Yorkshire got Match of the Day all right went into it more than you might think.

Presumably that says something about our social priorities in the Major/Blair era? That at least industrially, for once we were concentrating on peaceful purposes (but also having wars all over the place)? Or that we weren’t concentrating on anything much industrially, and instead exporting services and software? Or that something went catastrophically wrong with the civil service’s procurement capability in the 1990s?

It’s the kind of story Erik Lund would spin into something convincing.

The Penrith problem – structural incentives and mobile service networks

Eh, Charlie Stross’s blog is a machine for destroying time. Anyway. This post is going to be so wonkish it’s to not come back from.

An occasional theme on this blog has been the intersection between the Bush wars and the mobile phone industry. In fact, looking back, that’s not been so much an occasional theme as more of an obsession, and I’d have written more if I hadn’t been subject to non-compete clauses.

Everyone who reads this blog probably knows that Afghanistan got GSM coverage very quickly after 2001, with Roshan and the Afghan Wireless Communications Company or AWCC in the lead. Things went so fast that for a while there were four operators with licenses and a good half-dozen pirate networks. The explanation of this is pretty simple – in the early 2000s the mobile industry had developed a whole package of technology, business models, methods, and personnel that made it possible to unfurl a GSM network pretty much anywhere and make an absolute killing.

Thaksin Shinawatra’s career is a case in point – who knows how a Royal Thai Police colonel raised the money to come up as the holder of a GSM licence, but he did, and there were consulting engineers and contractors who would build the network and equipment vendors who would supply the parts with 100% vendor finance. Once it was up, it rained money and he was off to the races.

Of course Thailand is nothing like Afghanistan – a solid middle-income, industrialising economy with the kind of institutions that function by corruption rather than failing because of it. By 2001 there weren’t so many plums like that one to pluck and the buccaneers who were first in were beginning to think about cashing out.

On the other hand, the gear kept getting cheaper and the success-stories made it easier and easier to borrow from the World Bank or other friendly local multilateral financial institution, as at this point it looked like about the only development success in 40 years or so. Thanks to people like Mo Ibrahim and the rest at Mobile Systems International, the level of average revenue per user that made it viable to build a GSM network was driven down until now we’re operating below $5/month and there is no country that doesn’t have at least a little bubble of coverage around the capital city.

So that’s why it happened. There was a reliably deployable package of technology and economics and legalities, with a global workforce of Sven-units with frequent flyer points on every-damn-thing, and a set of reliable sources of capital. As well as the Aircom or Ericsson Professional Services guys who would design the network, and the contractors who would recruit the people who dug the foundations on the knolls and warps in the landscape that the radio planners made obscurely significant, there were others who would write the formal licence proposal to fit through the newly established bureaucracy of “regulators” and public procurement systems redesigned to please the IMF and other princes of the Washington consensus. No doubt there were people who specialised in operating the other, informal procurement systems. If you know what I mean. There was a product that sold and that, once sold, became one of the markers of modernity and status. The wheel of capital intensification kept turning, recapitulating the development of the Grand Banks fishery in the 1500s. Or something like what Erik Lund would say.

Of course, there were some problems with the package. Most of all, it structurally favours creating a new operator over extending an existing one’s network, which is why Uganda has six mobile phone networks (and two WiMAX DSL-substitute not-officially-mobile networks) when a lot of people who ought to know think the UK only needs three. The turn-key vendor contract is meant to give you all the bits you need to call yourself an operator; the MFI funding is released when the licence application is accepted; the money starts flowing when the 15% or so of the cells that carry 50% of the traffic are on line. Increasing population coverage is mostly cost, which is why a coverage requirement is typically laid down in the licence.

And that’s why supposedly (and that should be a big “supposedly”) Kabul has better mobile service than Rory Stewart’s constituency. Rory may need to consider what kind of mobile service places that stand in the same relation to Kabul as Penrith does to London get, and we’re going to discuss this (and some other stuff) in the next post.

Reflections on a HOWTO

I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. It was already fairly well-known at the time that Russia in 1917 really wasn’t the environment Marxists imagined would lead to a revolution and that Lenin had essentially retconned the whole thing to provide for giving history a little push. Malaparte’s unique contribution was to argue that it was more fundamental than that – the Bolshevik seizure of power could in reality have been carried out almost anywhere, for whatever reason. It wasn’t a strategic or ideological question, but one of operational art and tactics.

So, what’s this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important – you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything’s shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don’t, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings – get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.

Ideally, you do this by just floaking in through the front door as if you were in the railway station to catch a train rather than to seize the signalling centre. You’ll probably need, once you’ve got control of the real instruments of power, to stage some sort of symbolic overthrow of the government, but this is really only in order to get the message across to everybody else. Then, induce whatever authority is meant to be in charge after the head of government has been incapacitated to legitimise your action after the fact. It doesn’t matter much what state it’s in – a pro tip is to keep the parliament but get rid of enough opposition members to rig the vote.

Bada bing, bada boom, you are now the dictator.

From the other side, Malaparte argues that the worst thing that can go wrong is a general strike. There’s no point occupying key points if you can’t make the machine work yourself, as you’ll just be master of a lot of dark, cold buildings. The second worst thing that can go wrong is that you start to fall behind schedule. The whole trick relies on missing out as many people as possible, and the longer it takes, the more people have time to recover their orientation and get angry.

Interestingly, he comes up with something very like the 70s “historic compromise” concept in relation to this.

So you need either to get the support or at least the neutrality of the unions, or else render them unable to act in advance, which will mean fighting a civil war before you get to bring off the coup. And once you start, you’ve got to move quickly and keep moving.

Interestingly, he doesn’t say much about how you’re going to keep power once you’ve got it, if you can’t rely on calling everyone out on strike. After all, two can play at this game. This is a weakness in the whole concept, and quite an illuminating one.

Malaparte was a deeply odd character, a border-nationalist of German origins, an Italian first world war hero, later a diplomat and journalist and a fascist of the first hour who went on to fall out with fascism and get locked up. This is probably why he is read at all now. Having been released, he reported the Eastern Front of 1941 for the Italian papers until he fell out with the Germans, covered the Finnish sector until something similar happened, ended up back in Italy in time to take part in his second Italian coup (he had already managed to invade Russia twice, once as an attaché with the Poles in 1920 and again with the Germans as a journo in 1941, and live to tell the tale), served in the pro-Allied Italian army, and claimed to have become a communist.

He was also an almost joyously unreliable source, a self-mythologising war junkie who made Hemingway look sensible, and to be frank, if he fell out with the fascists it wasn’t because he was going soft or anything. I’ve read his dispatches from the Eastern Front (The Volga Rises in Europe) and found it hard to make out what the Germans objected to – obviously my standards aren’t those of a Wehrmacht press officer, but there’s a lot of hardboiled combat reporting, quite a bit of gratuitous fine writing, and nothing much critical of the war or Germany.

He also had an Ernst Röhm gay-fascist streak you could have landed a fleet of Savoia-Marchetti flying boats on, across it. Or at least his style did. The Volga… is just full of dashing blond Finnish officers and casually hunky, rough-trade Nazi recovery mechanics track-bashing in the Ukrainian sun, although there are a fair few fair country girls whose hearts and minds don’t seem to need much winning in there as well. (By the time it all got stuck in a ditch outside Rostov-on-Don he’d long since been ghosted by the German spin doctors.)

Anyway, a fascinating, utterly mad, and often deeply creepy writer. Back to the steps of the telephone exchange.

I think his coup technique is quite telling. Fascism always had an odd central contradiction in that it insisted it believed in hardcore political realism but also in romantic activism. Power, and specifically either firepower or horsepower, was all that mattered, but with enough will it would always be possible to change the power realities. Marxists offered inevitability; fascists opportunity. Rapid shock action directed at the key installations will give us the state, and that will give us everything else. Speed, style, ruthlessness, and cheek are everything. It’s the hope of audacity – get the right people together and a list of oil refineries, and everything is possible.

This may not sound very convincing, but it’s certainly true that many, many coups have been carried out following this rough plan.

Malaparte makes a complex distinction between the seizure of power in a parliamentary state and just using the parliamentary institutions to go legit later. He’s agin the first. I’m not so sure – two of the most successful coups of the 20th century were carried out in France, Petain’s parliamentary coup and de Gaulle’s rather less parliamentary one in 1958.

I think what’s happening here is that his residual fascist is showing.

Another thing that runs through the book is the idea, very common in extreme politics since 1918, that the military tactics of the late first world war – infiltration, independent action, surprise attack – can just be ported straight into politics. Malaparte actually goes so far as to make this explicit. It’s a great historical irony that the world experts of decentralised command were the Prussians, of course.

As always, though, it all makes for great tactics but lousy strategy.

A Little Bit of Egyptian Internet Twaddle

Pulling together various resources, I’m beginning to get a picture of what happened with the cut-off and restoration of the Internet in Egypt. First up, at least in some senses, it may be valid to say that the Internet played a role – Arbor Networks observed that traffic to and from Egyptian networks (and between them, in so far as any of them are customers of Arbor’s) had spiked dramatically, almost vertically, in the two hours before the cut-off and that the whole week up to the 28th of January had been one of unusually heavy traffic.

When the cut-off went into effect, at 5.20pm local time on the 27th, it was implemented by forcing all the networks that peer at the Telecom Egypt-controlled Internet exchange to drop their BGP peering sessions with the exception of AS20928, Noor Data Networks. Famously, this is the operator that serves the Central Bank and its payments settlement system. Essentially immediately, 2,576 networks announced by 26 Autonomous Systems became unreachable. The surviving 26 ASNs including, as well as the Central Bank, the Alexandria Library, and the national research & education network, which if it is at all like most NRENs has a lot of its own infrastructure.

On the 31st of January, there was a further wave of cut-offs which removed another 14 ASNs and 134 networks. The list of the last survivors is here – notably, someone had clearly realised that not cutting off the students, of all people, was a missed opportunity, as the NREN isn’t in there. However, one of the mobile operators (UAE incumbent Etisalat’s national opco) stayed online although they had been ordered to cut off the mobile service itself. Perhaps they provide service to the government’s mobile devices?

Interestingly, however, according to posts to NANOG, several of the .eg root DNS servers remained online (not surprisingly, as at least one is outside Egypt). Even more interestingly, even after the BGP sessions with the IX were pulled down, the lower layer equipment stayed active – Egyptian ISPs noticed that there was still link light on the fibre optic lines between their locations, and theoretically it would have been possible to cobble together static routing between their systems.

Similarly, the internal voice network remained operational and so did the international SS7 gateways that link it to other phone systems. As a result, some people found that they could still reach their ISP, whether by dial-up over the voice circuit or even sometimes on DSL. The question, though, was whether there were any routes beyond the ISP’s nearest point of presence. Several foreign ISPs offered free dial-up connectivity over international phone service (notably this French one).

And, it seems, Egyptian ISPs also tried to re-establish internal connectivity after the cut-off, when they noticed that the fibres were still lit up. However, the problem was more subtle than just pointing static routes at each other. Communicating with people outside Egypt wasn’t, after all, the primary need, and anyway, it required passing through the government-controlled exchange.

But the problem with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or what have you is that unless they have data centres in your country, they’re international traffic. Depending on their internal architecture, even if they do, they might be dependent on international routes. An Egyptian engineer who posted to NANOG during the revolution made the interesting point that, although Egyptian ISPs are relatively well-interconnected among themselves, not that much traffic flows over the interdomain links as so much stuff goes out to the global Internet. It’s analogous to the old problem that the topological centre of the African Internet was 36 Tooley Street, London SE1 (the LINX headquarters), or 111 8th Avenue, New York, depending on whose version of the story you like better, although less pernicious as the infrastructure is there to solve it.

Sometimes this is useful – it’s harder to censor stuff hosted in another jurisdiction. But it’s also a problematic dependency. Back in the Egyptian NOC the New York Times was hosted on, they were struggling to find copies of key software packages to distribute, for example clients for Internet Relay Chat messaging, and also critical data files such as cached DNS zones, lists of domain names and their corresponding addresses. Some ISP engineers are now working on preparing emergency packages of software and data for use in an extreme emergency – for example, regular dumps of the root and local DNS zones, similar snapshots of the local routing table, not to mention PGP signing keys and contacts for as many other engineers as possible.

After all this, what were the government’s aims? The initial cut-off was probably motivated by a combination of wanting to black out sources of independent information and hoping that it would hinder the protestors’ organising. Some of its particular details – for example, leaving 20928 up and not trying to shut down interdomain links within Egypt – may have been an effort to keep some “normal service” going, as well as not preventing VIPs from transferring their money out of the country. It’s also possible that cutting off link light between all Egyptian ISPs without physically grubbing up the fibres was harder than it looked.

So then, why did they bring it back on the Tuesday of camels and thugs? One interpretation is that they were hoping people would go home and update their Facebook statuses, which would have been incredibly patronising. But the Egyptian elite patronised the hell out of the public every time it went on TV, so it can’t be ruled out. Another one is that they hoped to project an impression of returning normality, which didn’t really fit with thugs on horseback swinging knives, but then their response wasn’t characterised by coherence.

Another still is that they hoped it would help to get the government’s propaganda out there. This argument – Gamal Mubarak flipping through his copy of The Net Delusion in a curtained backroom of the palace – has the advantage that when the Internet and the mobile networks were reactivated, there was a rash of reports of loyalist trolls, and one of the first things that happened was that the government forced the mobile operators to send out threatening bulk SMS messages – spam as a weapon. But this was surely incredibly optimistic.

In fact, what did happen was that people started doing precisely what they had only been doing to a limited extent the week before. Twitter feeds from Egypt filled up with what the NANOG crew would term operational content – requests for more medical supplies, reports of a lost child, calls for more protestors to mass at a specific gate into Tahrir Square. This was the real thing – a tactical radio network for the mob – and ironically it was mostly running over SMS and going out to servers elsewhere in the world. And, of course, its major carrier was the much reviled Vodafone Egypt, unwilling deliverer of Central Security’s spam blitz.