Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

Overreacting to fears of terrorism

Writing for Salon.com, pilot Patrick Smith makes some excellent points about the breathless paranoia we now display about terrorism:

What has become of us? Are we really in such a confused and panicked state that a person haplessly walking through the wrong door can disrupt air travel nationwide, resulting in mass evacuations and long delays? “The terrorists have won” is one of those waggish catch-alls that normally annoy me, but all too often it seems that way. Our reactionary, self-defeating behavior has put much at stake — our time, our tax dollars and our liberties.

…

In fact, over the five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports. In addition to those above were the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772, the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people, and the saga of TWA Flight 847.

…

Here in this proclaimed new “age of terrorism,” we act as if the clock began ticking on Sept. 11, 2001. In truth we’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades. Not only in the 1980s, but throughout the ’60s and ’70s as well. Acts of piracy and sabotage are far fewer today.

Imagine the Karachi attack happening tomorrow. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion — of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties.

What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope?

The message is similar to that of the excellent essay “Milksop Nation,” which won an Economist essay contest in 2002. Namely, that we do a poor job individually of assessing risks. We obsess over rare risks in which malicious actors want to do us harm, and we downplay common risks that are enormously more likely to injure or kill us. Worse, our political systems amplify our fears to the point of absurdity.

One thing we certainly need are people with the clear-sightedness and bravery to point out that we are fearful about the wrong things, and that we have real, pressing problems that we ought to be concentrating on instead.

LORAN being shut down

The ground-based LORAN network has been aiding navigation since WWII. Now, it is being shut down to save money, based on the thinking that the GPS system has made it obsolete. I had direct experience with the Pacific LORAN array and its coordinate system during the LIFEboat Flotillas. Most of the LORAN stations will go offline on February 8th, with the rest shutting down in the fall.

It is probably fair enough to say that LORAN is antiquated and redundant, though GPS is not without problems. It may eventually get a backup, if the EU finishes building their Galileo navigation satellite system by 2013, as planned.

Both LORAN and GPS function on the same basic principle: that if you know where certain radio transmitters are, and how far you are from each, you can sort out where you are located. GPS has the virtue of being global and increasingly ubiquitous, as more and more devices become capable of locating themselves using the system.

Pro-photography protest in London

Yesterday’s pro-photography protest in London was rather encouraging. Amateur and professional photographers came together to protest the restrictions and harassment of photographers that has developed in response to concerns about terrorism. The protest follows a European Court of Human Rights ruling that police don’t have the right to indiscriminately search people, just because they are taking photos. The “I’m a photographer, not a terrorist” campaign has objected specifically to police using Section 44 of the UK’s Terrorism Act to harass photographers. High-profile recent incidents include “7 armed police detaining an award winning architectural photographer in the City of London, the arrest of a press photographer covering campaigning santas at City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Paul’s Cathedral and many others.”

In addition to creating art and a historical record, photography has an important role to play in keeping security entities accountable for their actions. As I have said before, photography is an important mechanism for maintaining oversight over the police and private security forces. Restrictions on photograpy allow for power to be used with less oversight, probably leading to more incidents of abuse and fewer cases in which abusers are punished. Indeed, it has been shown repeatedly that only photo or video evidence is sufficient to produce convictions for police brutality. In short, restricting photography makes us less safe.

Both casual photographers and those with a more substantial connection to the practice should be aware of their rights as photographers, and be willing to stand up when people try to bully them out of taking pictures. The British campaign has produced a pocket sized card outlining what rights individuals have when stopped by a police officer. I have been meaning to print off and laminate a card with the relevant sections of Canadian law, for use next time someone insists that taking photos in public spaces is forbidden.

Military fuel use and climate

One of the organizations taking possible future fossil fuel scarcity most seriously is the American military. The Air Force is investigating how to make jet fuel from coal or natural gas. Meanwhile, the other branches of the military are looking for ways to reduce their fuel bills and vulnerability to fuel shortages. There is plenty of reason to do so, given that American forces are using about one million gallons of fuel per day each in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the cost per gallon in the most remote locations can run as high as US$400. The average cost for a gallon of fuel at a forward operating base is about US$15.

Some efforts being made include insulating tents, installing ‘smart grids’ on military bases, increasing usage of renewable forms of power, and investigating ways to use wastes for energy. As with other attempts to reduce fossil fuel dependence, there is no guarantee that these efforts will prove to be beneficial overall from a climatic perspective. If the Air Force manages to produce biofuels that are suitable for use in aircraft, have a decent energy return on investment, and do not compete with food crops, they may develop products and processes with considerable civilian applicability, and potential to mitigate greenhouse emissions. If, instead, they just perfect the oil German and Japanese trick of turning coal into liquid fuel, they may end up making the problem much worse. The very last thing humanity needs is another excuse to burn coal, when we really ought to be working out strategies to leave all that planet-warming carbon safely underground.

Of course, militaries are fundamentally hugely wasteful and destructive things. If we do manage to make a global transition to zero-carbon forms of energy, it seems probable that the world’s various armed forces will be the most resistant to accepting any restrictions on their emissions or fuel use. Much will depend on whether we can find energy sources that are actually cheaper and better than fossil fuels, or whether we manage to content ourselves with inferior options that don’t generate the same sort of climatic risks. In the first case, militaries may largely shift to low-carbon technologies on their own accord. In the latter case, prodding them into environmental responsibility may prove extremely difficult, especially if ongoing climate change has helped to make the world a less geopolitically stable place.

Crush the Cell

Covered bridge at night, Vermont

Michael Sheenan’s Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves covers ground that overlaps with that of Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent and Securing the City. Namely, the history of Al Qaeda in relation to the United States, and the question of what sort of policies the United States should adopt in response to terrorism. Sheehan brings an insider’s perspective, having served as New York’s Deputy Commissioner for counterterrorism. While Sheehan provides a lot of information and tries to argue a few key points, the book succeeds more as a source of raw information than as a source of analysis. In particular, Sheehan fails to fully justify his views that Al Qaeda will fizzle out in a few decades, and fails to provide a comparative justification for why targeting cells is the most effective way of undermining terrorist plots while avoiding unwanted secondary effects.

Sheehan covers a number of important and interesting topics: methods for counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement; the (limited) competence of Al Qaeda operatives; the risks that arise then officials practice ‘cover your ass’ security; the significance of weapons of mass destruction; torture and human rights; and the importance of not granting terrorists the psychological advantages that arise when we allow ourselves to be terrorized. In the last of those, he echoes a point well-made by Bruce Schneier. Sheehan also provides an insider’s perspective on the controversial rebuilding of the former World Trade Center site, including why construction has been so slow to begin.

Among the three books I have recently read on this subject, Securing the City probably provides the most insight into effective counterterrorism strategies developed and deployed in New York, while Ghost may be the most compelling personal account (though one lacking in balance). Crush the Cell occupies a middle territory – worth reading for those who want even more details and examples than they have found from other sources, but probably not essential reading for those only moderately interested in the subject.

The torture prorogation?

It was bad enough to prorogue Parliament to avoid an election, but doing the same to try to silence questions about Canada’s role in torturing detainees is far more dubious. As an article in the Ottawa Citizen explains:

When Harper prorogued last fall it was to avoid a vote of non-confidence. This time, it will be to avoid something possibly far more serious — Parliamentary censure of the government, the banishment or imprisonment of Harper and some of his ministers, or the RCMP being asked to execute a Speaker’s warrant.

While the torture allegations are being treated as a partisan issue, I don’t think that is the appropriate frame of view. This is an issue of international law, human rights, and how Canada is going to conduct itself in international military operations. The precise manner in which Canada should deal with detainees and other governments is one that should be scrutinized by Parliament (and, if necessary, the courts) and that scrutiny should occur where Canadians have the opportunity to observe it.

Our procedures for military oversight also need to be examined, to evaluate the question of whether key information is being properly routed up through military and civilian command structures.

[Update: 25 January 2010] This whole situation generated a considerable amount of protest: 200,000 or so coast to coast.

Intercepting UAV video

Metal steps

In an unexpected development in the contest between insurgents and drone-wielding western armies, it seems that cheap software is capable of intercepting video feeds from UAVs, and that this is being put to use in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. This is done using software like SkyGrabber, which is available online for about $25.

Insurgents with radio gear and the software cannot control the drones, but they can see what the Americans consider to be worth watching, work out where convoys are located, etc. The US is apparently working on improving the encryption used by the drones, in order to make it harder to intercept and interpret their communication. You wouldn’t think it would be so difficult to put chips on the drones that are capable of applying strong symmetric or public key encryption algorithms to outgoing communications. And as for bandwidth on the network, few contemporary encryption algorithms produce ciphertext that is substantially larger than plaintext; as such, the burden of transmission should be about the same with or without strong encryption.

Partly, all this is an illustration of how the security of a whole chain of operations can be compromised by the weakest components – especially when other components in the system will reduce their security level for the sake of compatibility. Just as it is problematic to have card readers for chip and PIN cards that will fall back to using the magnetic strip when the chip doesn’t work, it is problematic to have a drone communications network in which a few non-upgraded components degrade the quality of encryption across the entire link.

Making the transmissions more directional, and employing other techniques like frequency hopping, could also reduce the vulnerability of UAVs to both cryptanalysis and simple traffic analysis. Drones operating off satelite uplinks could be set up to broadcast overwhelmingly upward, where signals are unlikely to be intercepted. More autonomous drones that can operate independently and transmit information in short bursts might also be more resistant to interception. While the Taliban can’t be too advanced in their cryptographic capabilities, you can be sure that competing navies will be tryingt to get into the drone-based Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system the US Navy is building.

Open thread: Canada and Afghan detainees

As anyone who reads the news knows, it has been alleged that many detainees passed on by Canadian troops to elements of the government of Afghanistan were subsequently tortured, and that the government of Canada was aware of this likelihood. If true, that could represent a violation of Canadian and/or international law on the part of both those who gave the orders to continue making the transfers and those who actually carried them out. Knowingly passing along a prisoner to an authority that will torture and abuse them is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but it is not yet fully known what Canadian troops and officials knew or believed prior to making these transfers.

The latest development is a reversal of position by Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff. He now accepts that a man was taken into custody by Canadian soldiers in 2006 and subsequently severely beaten by Afghan interrogators.

Given that Canada cannot single-handedly reform the Afghan government and security services, this raises the question of how Canadian troops should be dealing with anyone who they capture during the course of Canada’s ongoing involvement in that country. Given that Afghanistan won’t be turning into a liberal-democratic state governed by the rule of law anytime soon, how should Canadian forces deployed there behave in the future?

Military assessments of climate change

In his scrupulously evenhanded book What’s the Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate, Greg Craven makes reference to four different assessments of climate change conducted by organizations with a link to the American military. All conclude that climate change is a serious problem, and that actions must be taken to mitigate it.

The first is the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, drafted by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, FBI, and NSA. While the report itself is classified, the chairman said that climate change could disrupt US access to raw materials, create millions of refugees, and cause water shortages and damage from melting permafrost.

Another is a 2003 Pentagon study: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security: Imagining the Unthinkable. It considers a worst-case but plausible scenario, and concludes that abrupt climate change could destabilize the geopolitical environment:

In short, while the US itself will be relatively better off and with more adaptive capacity, it will find itself in a world where Europe will be struggling internally, large number so [sic] refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.

It also argues that “with inadequate preparation, the result [of abrupt climate change] could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.”

The third report is from the Center for Naval Analyses. Their “blue-ribbon panel of retired admirals and generals from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines” produced the report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. It calls climate change “potentially devastating” and advises that the risks to national security will “almost certainly” get worse if mitigation action is delayed. It also stresses how we don’t require 100% certainty about the precise seriousness of a threat before it starts making sense to address it.

The last report was drafted by two national security think tanks: the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. Their 2007 report is titled: The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change. Their team included the head of the National Academy of Sciences, one Nobel laureate economist, a former CIA director, a former presidential chief of staff, climatologists, and others. They concluded that current projections from climate models are “too conservative” and that “at higher ranges of the [warming] spectrum, chaos awaits.” The authors conclude that an effective response would have to occur in less than a decade “in order to have any chance” of preventing irreversible disaster.”

The only fair conclusion that it seems possible to reach about these reports is that they have been ignored. If American policy-makers and members of the general public accepted these conclusions – and interpreted them with the seriousness accorded to matters of national security – we would not be seeing so much doddering around before meaningful action is taken. While the military does have an incentive to scare people, since doing so likely increases their funding, Craven is probably right to claim that the overall bias of these organizations is towards economic strength rather than environmental protection. That, and the calibre of the individuals associated with these reports, seems to provide good reason for taking them seriously.

Note that the issue of climate change and security has been discussed here previously.

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial

A number of recent articles have provided interesting commentary on the upcoming trial of alleged 9-11 plotter Khalid Shheikh Mohammed in an American federal court:

Given everything that has already happened, it is very hard to see how this can have a good outcome. The trial cannot be fair – since there have been so many rights and due process violations, and no impartial jury can be found – and the precedent seems highly likely to make bad law.

Slate contributor David Feige is probably right in summing up the likely outcome:

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will create will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

Given the situation they inherited, the Obama administration may not be able to do any better. Still, it is worrisome to think what the future consequences of this may be.

[Update: 12 February 2010] Due to the opposition he has encountered, Obama has abandoned plans to give KSM a civilian trial in New York. Disappointing.