Category: intelligence and stupidity

PRISM. Sometimes it’s easier to solve these things in L

I think it is probably important to direct attention to this post, which contains the only convincing explanation of PRISM I’ve yet seen, including the tiny budget (if it only cost $20m to process everything in Apple, Google, Facebook etc, what do they need all those data centres for), the overt denials, and the denial of any technical backdoor.

Basically, the argument is that PRISM is an innovation in the technology of law rather than the technology of computing, some sort of expedited court order programmed in Lawyer requiring the disclosure of specified data, and perhaps providing for enduring or repeated collection. This would avoid the need to duplicate vast amounts of infrastructure or trawl every damn thing, would stick to the letter of the law, and would help engineers sleep, as it wouldn’t imply creating a vulnerability that could be used by both the NSA and God-knows-who. It would also permit the President and such folk to deny that everyone was being monitored, as of course they are not.

That said, data could be requested on anybody who the court could be convinced was of interest. As the legalities seem quite permissive and anyway the court is a bit of a flexible friend, this means a lot of people. And in an important sense it doesn’t matter. The fact that surveillance is possible is important in itself. Bentham’s panopticon was based on the combination of overt surveillance – the prisoners knew that there was a guard watching them – and covert surveillance – the fact that the prisoners didn’t know at any given moment who the guard might be watching and therefore could not be certain they were not being observed.

The degree to which this was an aim of PRISM must be limited, because it was after all meant to be secret. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s there.

Something else. I’ve occasionally said that the Great Firewall of China should be seen as a protectionist trade-barrier as much as an instrument of censorship. Huge Chinese Internet companies exist that probably wouldn’t if everyone there used Facebook, Google, etc. Here you see another benefit of it – the Public Security Bureau gets to spy on QQ, but it’s harder for the Americans (or anyone else) to poke around. This may explain why the NSA seems to pick up lots of data from India and much less from KSA or China; you can PRISM for terrorists trying to affect the Indo-Pak nuclear balance and you can’t for Chinese targets.

Borders are always interesting, and this is today’s version.

Iran, of course, does another twist on this. It has a vigorous internal ISP industry, but monopolises international interconnection through a nationalised telco, DCI, that practices serious censorship. However, the same company also sells unfiltered, real Internet connectivity to actors outside Iran, notably in Oman, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, almost certainly following Iranian foreign policy goals. DCI has even gone so far as to invest heavily in a new Europe-Middle East submarine cable to add capacity and improve quality (notably by taking a shorter route to Europe, and adding path-diversity against Cap’n Bubba and his anchor). Back in 2006, supposedly, the best Internet service in Kabul was in the cybercafe they installed in the Iranian embassy’s cultural centre.

(A starter-for-ten. Has anyone else noticed that the major cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce/Heroku, Rackspace et al, aren’t mentioned?)

Update:

Yahoo! has not joined any program in which we volunteer to share user data with the U.S. government. We do not voluntarily disclose user information. The only disclosures that occur are in response to specific demands. And, when the government does request user data from Yahoo!, we protect our users. We demand that such requests be made through lawful means and for lawful purposes. We fight any requests that we deem unclear, improper, overbroad, or unlawful. We carefully scrutinize each request, respond only when required to do so, and provide the least amount of data possible consistent with the law.

The notion that Yahoo! gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users’ records is categorically false. Of the hundreds of millions of users we serve, an infinitesimal percentage will ever be the subject of a government data collection directive. Where a request for data is received, we require the government to identify in each instance specific users and a specific lawful purpose for which their information is requested. Then, and only then, do our employees evaluate the request and legal requirements in order to respond—or deny—the request.

Yahoo!’s top lawyer, spinning like a top, but basically confirming the notion of PRISM as a surveillance technology implemented in Lawyer.

A very Blairite disaster

So, the Kenyan Police counter-terrorism spokesman has this to say:

“Kenya’s government arrested Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” a Kenyan counter-terrorism spokesman, Muthui Kariuki, told the Associated Press. He added: “The Kenyan government cannot be held responsible for what happened to him after we handed him to the British authorities.”

Assorted relatives and friends seem to think the question is more whether the British had any business asking him questions while he was under the control of the Kenyans, who are alleged to have brutalised him in various ways. Further, the security service’s approach to recruiting informers seems to involve following them around and repeatedly buttonholing them, openly, in the street.

It sounds like an out-take from Four Lions – secret intelligence with a GOLF SALE sign. Perhaps the aim was actually deliberately overt, public, in your face surveillance, rather than recruitment, as a deterrent or an example to others. Either way, I think we can all agree that the situation has not developed to our advantage.

Which reminded me of this classic Daniel Davies post:

young Muslim men are exactly the ones who are vulnerable to being drawn into violent extremist movements, and their parents have both much better information about this happening than we do, and a powerful interest in stopping their sons turning into suicide bombers. In actual fact, [the launch of the CONTEST strategy was] yet another god-damned own goal which had the effect of getting peoples’ backs even further up.

How could this have been sold better?

Well, it seems to me that if the action that you want to achieve is “hand your children over to us”, the very most obvious message that you need to add to that is “we promise that we will keep them safe”. However, since our government currently has as its policy that it wants to hold people for 90 days without trial, and to extradite them without hearings to the Americans, who in turn might subject them to extraordinary rendition and waterboarding, we are not currently in a position to make that promise. We need to get into a position to make that promise, and fast.

A policy recommendation – if an allied police force catches someone like this, treat it as a consular matter and fetch the guy back to the UK. Then it can be a police matter. Or the secret services could try to persuade him to inform…in secret. Just letting the Kenyans or whoever batter him is just as bad and fools nobody. It also makes the UK look duplicitous and underhand as well as ruthless.

I suspect this is better advice than any of the barrage of availability entrepreneurship spewing from the surveillance industry, Hazel Blears, Hitchens Minor 2.0, or the swarm of assorted grant-seeking missiles this sad event has released.

Churchill was wrong for most of his career, you know…

This Ha’aretz piece is interesting for the insight it gives into Israeli policy and especially into process, but also for a couple of other things. Notably, it’s remarkably frank about the Obama administration deliberately trying to stop Netanyahu going to war, and the role of dodgy casino guy Sheldon Adelson in both US and Israeli right-wing politics, and it provides the new information that the Americans have given up on the formal diplomatic channel and concentrated on influencing the Israeli military directly, on a brasshat to brasshat basis. The implied conclusion is that the IDF leadership are interested in external reality while Bibi is too busy being Winston Churchill, and further that they are interested in getting information from the Americans about what their own prime minister is thinking.

Also, Netanyahu considers himself an expert on US politics. The danger here is that the America he is an expert on may not be the same America everyone else is dealing with. If, as I suspect, he is getting a lot of his information from his Republican contacts, he’s living in an alternate universe. In so far as people like Sheldon Adelson are impressed by US politicians who know Bibi Netanyahu personally, his contacts are literally being paid to tell him what he wants to hear. It’s ironically similar to Bush before the Iraq war, just with the stove-pipe reversed.

However, I was astonished by this quote:

While the Fifth Fleet of the U.S. Navy is operating in the Straits of Hormuz, just as the Pacific Fleet was anchored at its home base near Honolulu on the fateful morning of December 7, 1941, the two instances are not really comparable.

Well, no, they’re not, are they? Some tabloid journalists keep a few paragraphs of general-purposes “sexy” in a file they can drop into a story as required and just change a couple of parameters to fit. This sounds like the same thing, but with Churchill!

Meanwhile, Colin Kahl, and this. It does look like there’s a coordinated push-back against the bullshit, which is good news for those of us who remember 2002. The US Navy bombs Iran…with love. Of a purely Platonic form between comrades of the sea. Oops. while also bringing the carrier back.

US policy does look like it’s trying to achieve three goals – 1) no war with Iran, 2) reassure the GCC countries (so they don’t start one), 3) restrain the Israelis (without pressing so hard they freak and start one). These are partly contradictory, but then what isn’t? Certainly, the combination of being ostentatiously nice to Iranian sailors while also sailing a giant carrier up and down the Gulf does fit the needs of 1) and 2).

a short telegram, or a very long tweet

Everyone’s linked to Mark Perry (of Conflicts Forum/Alistair Crooke fame)’s piece on Israeli spooks running around Baluchistan posing as the CIA already, but I will too as it’s very interesting indeed. I’m not sure what their bag in this is, other than the notion of “always escalate” and hope to profit from the general confusion.

But what’s really interesting is what the story is doing out there now. Here’s Laura Rozen’s write-up, which introduces the suggestion that they may have represented themselves as being from NATO and notes that a leader of the organisation said as much on Iranian TV before being executed. Meanwhile, the Iranians write to the Americans accusing the CIA of being behind the assassination of another nuclear scientist.

On Twitter, she suggests that the scientist wasn’t killed by the Americans (i.e. presumptively by the Israelis, or by people working for them wittingly or otherwise), and that this was staged specifically to queer the possibility of reviving the Iran-Turkey uranium swap deal. (You do wonder what George F. Kennan would have made of diplomatic tweeting.) Further, we know that a back-channel has been set up.

Disclosing information about the Israeli operation in Baluchistan might be a smart way of establishing trust between the US and Iran. Obviously, information about terrorists running about blowing stuff up and killing people is of value to Iran. Information that it’s the Israelis is obviously congenial to Iran. Crucially, burning an Israeli spy network is costly to the Americans and not something they would do lightly (the Perry piece is a monument to important people trying all they could to do nothing). In that sense, it is a meaningful signal – much more convincing than mere words. Presumably, Perry’s role at Conflicts Forum and with Arafat makes him a convincing postman into the bargain. And third-party spies are just the sort of thing that enemies can bond over. I recall reading about the IRA and the UVF staging a joint investigation to find informers in the early 1970s.

Another dose of speculation – if Baluch rebels were meeting with people who they thought were from NATO, was this plausible because NATO was in fact paying them off to leave the Karachi-Quetta-Kandahar supply route alone?

The intersection of electronic warfare and mall management

Here’s something interesting. You may remember this story from back in November about the CIA spy network in Lebanon that met at a Pizza Hut they codenamed PIZZA, and which was rolled up by a joint Hezbollah-Lebanese military intelligence investigation. The key detail is as follows:

U.S. officials also denied the source’s allegation that the former CIA station chief dismissed an email warning that some of his Lebanese agents could be identified because they used cellphones to call only their CIA handlers and no one else.
…
Lebanon’s security service was able to isolate the CIA informants by analyzing cellphone company records that showed the numbers called, duration of each call and location of the phone at the time of the call, the source said.

Using billing and cell tower records for hundreds of thousands of phone numbers, software can isolate cellphones used near an embassy, or used only once, or only on quick calls. The process quickly narrows down a small group of phones that a security service can monitor.

If the top paragraph is true, it would have been catastrophically ill-advised. Even somebody special, like a CIA agent under diplomatic cover, has a relatively large number of weak ties to normal people. This is the reverse of the small-world principle, and is a consequence of the fact that the great majority of people are real human beings rather than important persons. As a result, things like STELLAR WIND, the illegal Bush-era effort to analyse the whole pile of call-detail records at AT&T and Verizon in the hope that this would find terrorists, face a sort of Bayesian doom. We’ve gone over this over and over again.

However, phone numbers that only talk to special people are obviously suspicious. Most numbers with a neighbourhood length of 1 will be things like machine-to-machine SIMs in vending machines and cash points, but once you’d filtered those out, the remaining pool of possibles would be quite small. It is intuitive to think of avoiding surveillance, or keeping a low profile, but what is required is actually camouflage rather than concealment.

There are more direct methods – which is where electronic warfare and shopping mall management intersect.

Path Intelligence, a Portsmouth-based startup, will install a network of IMSI-catchers, devices which act as a mobile base station in order to identify mobile phones nearby, in your shopping centre so as to collect really detailed footfall information.

Similarly, you could plant such a device near that Pizza Hut to capture which phones passed by and when, and which ones usually coincided. Alternatively, you could use it in a targeted mode to confirm the presence or absence of a known device. Which makes me wonder about the famous Hezbollah telecoms network, and whether it was intended at least in part to be an electronic-intelligence network – as after all, nothing would be a better cover for a huge network of fake mobile base stations than a network of real ones.

Meanwhile, this year’s CCC (like last year’s) was just stuffed with GSM exploits. It really is beginning to look a lot like “time we retired that network”.

Now that’s what I call lobbying

In the recent case of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, there was an issue that the news media spent an enormous amount of time and effort dancing around with innuendo, newspaper code, and carefully lawyered prose. It is a fact that the word “lawyered” is to the word “lawyer” as the word “doctored” is to the word “doctor”. Without understanding this hidden and sordid side of the issue, you would have been seriously misinformed. The matter was very sensitive, and there was an excellent chance of getting sued and probably also demonised as being deranged by shameful prejudices.

I refer, of course, to whether or not the Defence Secretary’s private office was having unprotected sex with other defence secretaries’ private offices.

It took a while to surface this at all – the Guardian let a wee squeak out on Thursday, and eventually it was the Sindy that took the plunge and surfaced it in the same way you surface a submarine, with an enormous roar of compressed air thundering into the ballast tanks under pressure while the nuclear reactor cranks up to full power. It’s a must read.

The fact that Werritty’s freebies included trips to the Herzliya Security Conference paid for by pro-Israeli lobbying groups should have been a screaming giveaway, but then, that’s what a good cover story is for. I presume that was what the Sindy eventually followed up.

I mentioned this element of the story to Daniel Davies earlier in the week. I can offer no special insight except for the enduring value of pattern recognition. This has, after all, happened before in recent memory, with really bad consequences.

Consider Mr. Michael Ledeen and the affair of the weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ledeen, a professional neoconservative, claimed to have intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium and various other things, which came from his contacts in Iran, some of whom were recommended to him by his contacts in Israel, one of whom, Larry Franklin, was convicted of spying for Israel in the US State Department. Ledeen believed these contacts to be renegade members of the Iranian secret service. (He had never visited Iran, and I think to this day never has, and he doesn’t to the best of my knowledge speak Persian, so how he would have known is beyond me.) The CIA, for its part, believed that this was partly true. They just disagreed with the “renegade” bit. But Donald Rumsfeld had deliberately decided to ignore the CIA, so Ledeen’s intelligence was accepted. However, that wasn’t the end of the story. At some point, the Department of Defense became suspicious and called in its own Counter-Intelligence Field Activity to investigate.

At this point, a thick curtain of secrecy was drawn down on the story, even if we did eventually get the Phase IIA report. Whatever CIFA found out, Ledeen was able to introduce the famous forged documents on uranium from Niger, which seem to have come from the Italian secret service, as being Iranian information with Israeli approval, and this was used in the even more famous dossier.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if old blogging chum from way back in the day, 2004, Laura Rozen hasn’t also had this thought, as she was instrumental in digging into the whole Ledeen affair and she’s too smart to miss it. Also, hilariously, she and Spencer Ackerman had the honour of being targeted by Ledeen’s mates in Silvio Berlusconi’s intelligence service with a scurrilous smear-campaign. I should probably hat-tip the lady’s Twitter feed.

Note the elements of the story. Ledeen is a semi-official adviser with special, privileged access to policymakers. He is outside the formal requirements of government service, but has access inside it. He is seen to have special access to an important ally, and therefore to be trustworthy. A third party observed this, and took advantage of it to introduce information (or rather, disinformation) into the policymaking system. Does anybody see a pattern here? Similarly, Werritty was offered privileged access from outside the government firewall because he was ideologically congenial. It seems that this was considered acceptable because the influence exerted came from a country considered friendly. But then, there were the rogue Iranian intelligence agents, or were they just ordinary Iranian intelligence agents?

In May 2009, Mr Werritty arranged a meeting in Portcullis House between Mr Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with close links to President Ahmadinejad’s regime. In February this year, Mr Werritty arranged a dinner with Mr Fox, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, and senior political figures – understood to include Israeli intelligence agents – during an Israeli security conference in Herzliya, during which sanctions against Iran were discussed. Despite Mr Werritty having no official MoD capacity, an Israeli source said there was “no question” that Mr Werritty was regarded as anyone other than Mr Fox’s chief of staff who was able to fix meetings at the highest levels, and was seen as an “expert on Iran”.

Well, at least Werritty actually went to Iran. Unfortunately this is the worst of the story, as it seems he was going round encouraging Iranian dissidents, or people he thought were Iranian dissidents, and promising them British support. This is really incredibly, shamefully irresponsible – he could have got people killed, and it cannot be ruled out that he did, although it’s also quite possible that the whole affair was just a massive exercise in bullshitting and wanktankery.

Probably he really believes that he was in contact with the opposition. I’m fairly sure Ledeen doesn’t think he’s an Iranian agent either. This is where this classic Onion article comes into play. As I said at the time, why *do* all these Iranian agents keep sucking Michael Ledeen’s cock?

It is all reminiscent of Bruce Schneier’s thoughts on what happens if you create a backdoor into some computer system, so people like us can get in and out without anyone noticing. The problem is that once you do that, it immediately becomes the biggest security threat to the system as anyone else can use it too. Once this new interface to the MoD was created, with Werritty accepting connections from the wider Internet and forwarding them to Fox, of course it attracted dubious actors. Hence the parade of various people trying to sell aircraft spares and dodgy encryption software to the military or to get someone’s knighthood expedited.

For my next trick, what parallels do you see between Werritty’s role with Liam Fox and those of Andy Coulson and Neil Wallis with No.10 Downing Street and the Metropolitan Police (and of course the Conservative Central Office) respectively? Remember that both of them were at various times funded by third parties. Further, is it not interesting that the same key Conservatives who defended Coulson to the bitter end – George Osborne and Michael Gove – also tried to save Liam Fox? (Jonathan Freedland seems to have sensed something here – check out the reference to “Cheneyite Tories”.) And is it not even more interesting that George Osborne actually recommended Andy Coulson for the job? And is it not completely fucking outrageous that William Hague, Atlantic Bridge board member and Foreign Secretary (I think this is the right order of precedence), dares to claim that proper Cabinet government is back in the midst of this berserk threat-chaos?

tasks

I’m not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it’s not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time – here’s their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the “Enough Project” is going to be using UNOSAT imagery itself, going by UNOSAT’s own website.

If you follow the link you’ll see that they have more than reasonable capability (50cm resolution) and that they routinely observe the presence of refugees/displaced persons and returnees, construction, and the like. There’s obvious relevance to an effort to monitor potential conflict along the border, especially as oil prospecting is an issue. You can’t easily hide oil exploration from a satellite that can resolve objects 50cm across.

However, the downside is that the UNOSAT report is comparing images over a two-year period. I would suspect that they will need much more frequent passes to be operationally responsive, which is where the costs get interesting.

Also, I’ve just been over to the website and it’s a bit of an unstructured clickaround. What I’ve always liked about MySociety sites is that they all have a function – FixMyStreet reports things in your street that need fixing, WDTK issues Freedom of Information Act requests, TWFY looks up information on MPs, TheStraightChoice logged what candidates promised and said about each other during their campaigns. DemocracyClub, for example, worked because as soon as you logged in it gave you something to do and some feedback about doing it, and then it hassled you to do something more. It had structure.

Notoriously, if you don’t give volunteers something to do as soon as they show up, they’ll wander off. It is nowhere easier to wander off than on the Internet. And so there’s a button to twitbookspace it and a donation link. There isn’t, however, a to-do list or, say, a list of pairs of images that need comparing.

review of a movie that doesn’t exist yet

I think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang’s blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there’s a great movie to be made here – the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests and emotions that drive it forward, the eternal ambiguity of the relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated.

The ISI comes out of it as being dastardly clever, but in a deeply futile way. They succeed in preventing a dangerous outbreak of peace and sanity, but what have they gained? The wars grind on, the butcher’s bill ticks up, the fantasy of a Pakistani empire of trucks and pipes across the Hindu Kush is as far away as ever, the Indians continue with their industrialisation across the other border.

The Americans come out of it as being well-meaning but naive. After all, they only get into this story because they want peace. So does the real Taliban leader. They both share a sort of big, stupid nobility.

The British do almost as badly as the ISI; not only do they end up being the dupes of the piece, they do so without the saving grace of having good intentions. They’re as naive as the Americans but more underhanded. SIS gets involved purely as a way of sucking up to the Americans and putting one over its real enemies, GCHQ, Her Majesty’s Forces, MI5, and the main-line Foreign Office diplomats. The Government is desperately keen on the project for similarly base reasons – to suck up to the Americans, to grab at an opportunity to solve its problem in Afghanistan, and of course to embarrass the Labour Party. Of course, it would have been a brilliant political fix had it come off – but the master manipulator is not Bismarck but William Hague.

The fake sheikh, meanwhile, is a classic example of the Pinocchio/Hauptmann von Kopenick theme – the puppet of bigger forces who becomes a power in his own right. Without his successful performance, of course, none of the many expectations curling around the tale have a hope of happening. His agency is real, and his character expands to fill the role. The fact that the whole project is an exercise in theatre is interesting in itself – a film within the film. The actors in the film are, of course, puppets of the script and the direction, and it is a work of fiction. The enduring purpose of the theatre and the cinema, however, is that works of fiction have real influence on their audiences. Like the fake sheikh.

After all, the grocer of Quetta (not a bad title) is the only character in the drama who successfully pursues his interests. He gets some interesting time off away from his bazaar stall, and even gets rich. You could play this as the ordinary man who succeeds in making fools of the powerful who insist on involving him in their schemes, or perhaps as a microcosm of all the people who are getting rich off the continued war, Mother Courage rather than Kopenick. Alternatively he could be killed off, casting the whole thing as an utterly bleak tragedy. However, arguably the classic in this vein is The Third Man and that sticks with the tragicomic.

killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphere

So the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which lead to documents in a sensible format, some of which lead to documents in pointlessly wrong formats, and some of which lead to PDF files. It provides no clue how often this data will be released or when or where. The URIs sometimes suggest that they might be predictable, sometimes they are just random alphanumeric sequences. Basically, what he said.

Meanwhile, very few of these documents have made it onto data.gov.uk, the government’s data web site (pro-tip: the hint is in the name) which provides all that stuff out of the box. This is not just disappointing – this is actively regressive. Is it official policy to break data.gov.uk?

Anyway, I’ve been fiddling with NetworkX, the network-graph library for Python from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sadly it doesn’t have a method networkx.earth_shattering_kaboom(). I’ve eventually decided that the visualisation paradigm I wanted was looking me in the eye all along – kc claffy‘s Skitter graph, used by CAIDA to map the Internet’s peering architecture.

The algorithm is fairly simple – nodes are located in terms of polar coordinates, on a circular chart. In the original, the concept is that you are observing from directly above the north or south pole. This gives you two dimensions – angle, or in other words, how far around the circle you are, and radius, your location on the line from the centre to the edge. claffy et al used the longitude of each Autonomous System’s WHOIS technical contact address for their angles, and the inverse of each node’s linkdegree for the radius. Linkdegree is a metric of how deeply connected any given object in the network is; taking the inverse (i.e 1/linkdegree) meant that the more of it you have, the more central you are.

My plan is to define the centre as the prime minister, and to plot the ministries at the distance from him given by the weighting I’d already given them – basically, the prime minister is 1 and the rest are progressively less starting with Treasury and working down – and an arbitrary angle. I’m going to sort them by weight, so that importance falls in a clockwise direction, for purely aesthetic reasons. Then, I’ll plot the lobbies. As they are the unknown factors, they all start with the same, small node weighting. Then add the edges – the links – which will have weights given by the weight of the ministry involved divided by the number of outside participants at that meeting, so a one-on-one is the ideal case.

When we come to draw the graph, the lobbies will be plotted with the mean angle of the ministries they have meetings with, and the inverse of their linkdegree, with the node size scaled by its traffic. Traffic in this case basically means how many meetings it had. Therefore, it should be possible to see both how effective the lobbying was, from the node’s position, and how much effort was expended, from its size. The edges will be coloured by date, so as to make change over time visible. If it works, I’ll also provide some time series things – unfortunately, if the release frequency is quarterly, as it may be, this won’t be very useful.

Anyway, as always, to-do no.1 is to finish the web scraping – the Internet’s dishes. And think of a snappy name.

2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrong

Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn’t defeat the Israelis and hold a victory parade in Tel Aviv, but then nobody least of all them expected or aimed for that. The outcome of 2006 can only be understood in the light of a realistic assessment of the conflict parties’ capabilities, interests, and priorities. A score draw is a much better result for Stoke City against Manchester United than it is for Manchester United against Barcelona.

For Hezbollah, the first and overriding goal was surely survival – as it is for everyone, it’s even the title of the IISS Journal – followed closely by survival as a force in Lebanese politics, survival of their capability to maintain their self-declared insecurity zone in northern Israel, and finally, inflicting casualties and costs on the Israelis in order to create a deterrent effect. In that light, the result of 2006 was surely just as good from their point of view as they made out – they came away still in the field, still firing rockets, and with their status in Lebanese politics enhanced.

For Israel, well, perhaps one day they’ll work out what their strategic aims were.

Elkus argues that the tactical situation at the point when the UN ceasefire went into effect was favourable for Israel, and that had the war gone on they might have done better. This is possible. However, it’s also very common for wars to end like this. The Israelis’ campaign in 1967 was designed, once they got the upper hand, to get to the Canal and onto the Golan before the UN blew the whistle – one of Ariel Sharon’s frequent blind-eye manoeuvres in 1973 was also intended to complete the encirclement of the Egyptian 3rd Army before the UN ceasefire went into effect. The Indian plan for the 1971 war was explicitly intended to take Dhaka before a ceasefire was imposed. More recently, the Russian operation in Georgia was subject to a similar deadline. International intervention is part of the environment, and only fools wouldn’t take it into account as a planning assumption.

An interesting sidelight on this, also from Elkus, came up in a parallel blog debate about “network-centric warfare” – he pointed to this gung-ho but good piece about the action in northern Iraq in which John Simpson was blown up. What struck me about it, however, was more that it was an example of this kind of thing – which should certainly make you think about 2006, especially in the light of this.

Tangentially, Sean Lawson’s essay on the history of “network centric warfare” is well worth reading, especially for the way so many US officials in 2001-2006 seem to have been competing to see who could validate all the most extreme stereotypes of themselves the fastest, and more broadly on the way a basically sensible idea can become a sort of gateway drug to really insane strategic fantasies.

Cebrowski talked of a “booming export market for…security” and warned those who would resist, “If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense” (Cebrowski, 2003c).

Measured against the sort of capabilities the NCW thinkers knew they had, and the kind of goals they dreamed on the basis of them, what possible results wouldn’t look like failure? Compared with the enormous arrogance of this vision – they really did want everyone who thinks the CIA wants them dead, dead – what resistance wouldn’t look like success?