Security – Page 27 – a sibilant intake of breath

The history of anti-Semitism

In the course of reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I have learned more about the history of anti-Semitism than from any other source I can recall. I wasn’t exposed to it in literature until recently and I don’t remember hearing anything much about it before high school. There, I recall it being treated as basically an exclusively Nazi phenomenon that arose in the interwar years and was basically crushed after the Nuremburg Trials (though there are worrisome re-emergences in the European far right).

As such, it was surprising to read a history going back to the 6th century. Rhodes describes the experience of Jews in the Roman Empire; a protection deal some made with the son of Charlemagne; massacres when Jews were blamed for the bubonic plague; the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and France in 1392; their harsh treatment by Catherine the Great and the Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia; the forcing of Jewish children into 31 years of military service by Czar Nicholas I in 1825; and various other outrages extending into the 20th century. Reading Rhodes’ book was also the first time I had been exposed to the actual contents of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an anti-Semetic text that describes a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and which apparently had a large effect on the thinking of Adolf Hitler.

The longest passage included, which was plagiarized from a novel called Biarritz, reads a lot like J.K. Rowling:

At eleven o’clock, the gates of the cemetery creak softly and the rustling of velvety coats is heard. A vague, white figure passes like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone; here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead and whispers a prayer. Another figure approaches; it is that of an old man, bent and limping. It coughs and sighs as it moves. The figure takes its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers a prayer. A third figure appears, and then a fourth and so on until thirteen figures have finally appeared, each one having repeated the aforementioned procedure.

When the thirteenth and final figure has at last taken its place, a clock strikes midnight. From out of the grave there comes a sharp, metallic sound. Suddenly, a blue flame appears and lights up the thirteen figures. A hollow voice says, “I greet you heads of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.” And the figures dutifully reply, “We greet you, Son of the Accursed.”

It is easy to imagine Harry Potter and his wand-wielding friends being added to the scene.

In a sense, it is laughable that this sort of text influenced how politically influential people thought about members of an ethnic group. At the same time, that is frightening. The whole text is a bunch of cobbled-together plagiarized nonsense, and yet it was apparently one of only three books owned by the last Czarina of Russia. I think that shows just how poor quality evidence people are willing to accept, when it confirms something they already believe, as well as just how quick human beings are to demonize one another.

It also suggests that Jewish people have plenty of historical reason to worry about what the governments of both their own states and those of their neighbours might do to them, if the present climate of relative tolerance that exists in most of the world is disrupted. Several contemporary Middle Eastern leaders have apparently expressed their view that the Protocols are a legitimate document, including Presidents Nasser and Saddat in Egypt, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Qaddafi of Libya. Similarly, textbooks in Saudi Arabia apparently describe the Protocols as factual.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I picked up a copy of Stieg Larsson’s book while waiting for a friend at one of those Starbucks locations embedded symbiotically in a Chapters. It certainly satisfied the ideal of the light summer read: quick to get through, reasonably interesting, and lacking in complex plot or literary elements that might impede one’s progress through the pages.

I appreciated the references to Pippi Longstocking, and enjoyed imagining the protagonist as a fictionalized version of George Monbiot. I also appreciated how Larsson showed some awareness of the relative danger of murderous psychopaths compared to commonplace domestic violence. While the former certainly sells more movie tickets and paperbacks, the latter is a far more pervasive danger within society, and deserves a lot more attention, police resources, and concern.

GSM encryption cracking demo

I have written before about how the encryption used by GSM cell phones is not secure. At the upcoming Defcon conference, Chris Paget is planning to demonstrate how the cryptoscheme in GSM can be circumvented completely, using a man-in-the-middle attack, based around a device called an ‘IMSI catcher.’ Specifically, he is planning to “intercept and record cellular calls made by [his] attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required.”

This is a good illustration of some of the limitations of cryptography. Even very sound encryption algorithms are often used in ways that make them vulnerable to attack, including man-in-the-middle attacks where legitimate senders and receivers don’t realize their communications are being routed through a third party. The take-home message is: just because something is encrypted, don’t assume that other people won’t be able to access it.

Open thread: the future of Russia

After the collapse of communism, many in the West assumed that democracy and free market capitalism would triumph in the former Soviet Union. Instead, it seems the chaos in the post-communist period permitted the emergence of economically powerful oligarchs, as well as massive growth in the wealth and power of organized crime groups. Now, former members of the security services, led by Vladamir Putin, are continuing to cement their own control.

There is much about Russia that is worrisome: the suppression of the free press and murder of journalists; continued appalling conduct in Chechnya; ongoing attempts to dominate neighbouring states, including through war; the exploitation of Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels; and more.

What do readers think might happen to Russia in the next 25 or 50 years? What are the most desirable and undesirable plausible outcomes, from the perspective of the Russian people, the world as a whole, central European states, the European Union, and the United States? What effect would different potential outcomes in Russia have on Canada?

Top Secret America

Over the last couple of years, The Washington Post has undertaken a major project to document the growth of the government security apparatus in the United States. It is entitled: ‘Top Secret America.’

Three long and interesting articles are now online:

One inescapable conclusion is that none of this – the massive secret compounds, the turf wars between agencies, and the changes in how government functions – could be undone quickly or easily.

It is just a new reality for the United States.

Recovering keystrokes from audio recordings

Those trying to compromise the integrity of computer systems have a large variety of attack options to work with: everything from mathematical approaches to breaking cryptography, to TEMPEST attacks based on unintentional signal radiation, to social engineering methods designed to trick people into granting them access. A recent Economist article highlights a danger likely to be unfamiliar to most, namely how it is possible to convert audio recordings of typing back into text:

Such snooping is possible because each key produces a characteristic click, shaped by its position on the keyboard, the vigour and hand position of the typist, and the type of keyboard used…

That said, the method does have one limitation: in order to apply the language model, at least five minutes of the recorded typing had to be in standard English (though in principle any systematic language or alphabet would work). But once those requirements are met, the program can decode anything from epic prose to randomised, ten-character passwords.

The software being employed seems fairly clever. It augments the audio data with frequency analysis, based on how often individual letters and specific pairs of letters come up in English text. With refinements, it seems plausible that it could be made to work with a smaller sample.

Making a computer system secure against a capable and resourceful attacker is extremely difficult. That said, the basic principles of security continue to hold. For instance, using defence in depth can reduce the severity of any breach – for instance, by keeping critical files encrypted. Also, it must always be remembered that security involves trade-offs. Increasing security against these audio attacks is no different, and it will always be accompanied by some cost, in terms of finances, convenience, or security of a different type.

Black blocheads

These window smashers who show up at every big international gathering certainly are annoying! They dominate the news coverage, obscuring any legitimate messages from activist groups. Furthermore, they act to justify the expense and intrusion of the heavy-handed security that now accompanies these events.

Incoherent rage against miscellaneous organizations (G8, G20, WTO, etc) doesn’t advance any sort of political agenda. It just distracts from serious discussions. Arguably, it also helps prevent the various legitimate organizations that attend these protests from engaging meaningfully with one another. After all, their priorities and agendas certainly do not align perfectly, and they clash on many issues. When protests are mostly angry pageants, it isn’t necessary to consider such substantive matters. The closer you get to actual policy-making, however, the more important it becomes to address contradictions so that something can actually be done.

Is there any way to eliminate the bandana-wearers as a constant feature of these gatherings? Obviously, massive security spending doesn’t achieve that aim. Perhaps a more energetic rejection of such individuals and tactics within the activist community could. Given how effectively the violent minority drowns out important messages, finding some way to keep a lid on them would probably benefit a lot of people.

Peak oil and climate change

Given the multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that humanity is causing the climate to change in potentially dangerous ways, climate change has to be part of medium- to long-term planning for almost everybody, and part of the policy development processes of government. At the same time, there is a plausible case that global production of oil will peak at some point in the relatively near future, with potentially important economic, political, and geopolitical effects.

How will these two phenomena interact? I can think of lots of possibilities. These are not ranked in any way, and are not equally plausible.

1) Worries about peak oil prove premature or overblown. Liquid fuels stay cheap for the foreseable future, causing more climate change than there would have been in a scenario where they became more costly.

2) Natural reserves of petroleum cannot keep pace with rising demand, initially driving liquid fuel prices through the roof. Some combination of biofuels and coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology counteracts that, also worsening climate change. (Coal-to-liquids and fuels like palm oil grown in rainforest have huge climate impact per unit of energy)

3) Peak oil proves serious, and biofuel and CTL alternatives prove very costly. This has potentially large social and economic consequences, but makes climate change mitigation easier. For many people, the world gets a whole lot smaller.

4) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments sense their increased vulnerability and abandon attempts to cooperate internationally, seeking to make themselves as robust as possible in the face of the chaos ahead.

5) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments finally get the picture and introduce harsh policies restricting fossil fuel production domestically. Powerful states now profoundly concerned about climate change (the US, EU, China, Japan, etc) force petrostates like Canada and Kuwait to shut down production.

6) Not only does oil production peak, but so does gas and coal production. Dealing with climate change becomes much easier politically, given that there is no longer any real alternatives to switching to renewables and nuclear as principal sources of energy.

7) Peak oil proves serious, but cellulosic and algae-based biofuels finally emerge as commercially viable alternatives.

Personally, I think peak oil is a much less serious problem than climate change. For one thing, it is just the sort of phenomenon that markets deal with relatively automatically – something gets scarce and people find ways to use less, while developing alternatives. For another, it doesn’t include the same dangerous lag times. It is quite possible that we could emit enough to cause catastrophic warming, but only see concrete proof of that decades later. Peak oil, by contrast, seems likely to unfold with fewer surprises. Finally, there aren’t really any positive natural feedbacks that would further constrain the availability of oil, as it began to get scarce (though falling energy return on investment (EROI) is an issue). By contrast, warming is likely to beget more warming as ice vanishes, forests dry out an burn, permafrost and methane clathrates melt, etc.

Surely there are many other possibilities, aside from those listed above. Please post some below, and comment on those listed above. How do the different possible scenarios effect how we ought to be hedging our bets, both climatically and in terms of energy sources?

Will war ever be carbon neutral?

Ideally, the next few decades will see all the world’s economies begin the difficult transition towards carbon neutrality, so as to stop anthropogenic climate change. Fossil fuels will represent a progressively smaller share of what drives vehicles and power plants, and complimentary measures will enhance carbon sinks.

If all that happens in the civilian sphere, is there any chance we will see it in the military? Military vehicles are definitely fuel hogs: whether it is supersonic fighter jets or main battle tanks driven by gas turbines.

It seems plausible that armies will be the last hold-out, when it comes to achieving carbon neutrality. National security has almost always been given priority over civilian needs, especially in non-democratic states. Furthermore, if weapons that produce large amounts of greenhouse gases are more effective than those that do not, any state with current or possible future enemies will find their military strategists unwilling to abandon them. It is also plausible that climate change itself will produce a more dangerous world, in which politicians and the public are even more supportive of developing military strength than they are now.

Perhaps the armed forces are such a small share of total emissions that this isn’t really a problem. Indeed, it does seem plausible that we can cut down the level of emissions to the point where the risk of climate change is much diminished, without having to tinker with them at all. Still, the question of how to move to a carbon-neutral world entirely unthreatened by climate change will eventually involve the question of how to get generals to give up their carbon-intensive habits, perhaps after titans of business and ordinary citizens have eventually done so.

Biohazard

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ken Alibek – a formerly high ranking official within the Russian biological weapons program – defected to the United States. His 1999 book can be seen as a declassified, commercial, civilian version of what he told the American intelligence officials who he initially debriefed. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Biological Weapons Program in the World focuses on the facilities of Biopreparat: an ostensibly civilian organization that was actually the major developer and stockpiler of biological weapons. They made anthrax and smallpox by the tonne, and developed mechanisms for deploying these agents ranging from assassination-type mechanisms to delivery via intercontinental ballistic missile.

Alibek makes a number of serious allegations:

Russia developed biological weapons as far back as 1928, when work was done on weaponizing typhus;
That Russia violated the Biological Weapons Convention from the start;
That biological agents like plague and smallpox were genetically modified to be resistant to treatments and vaccines, to be more virulent, and to produce additional toxins;
That Russia continued to develop and stockpile biological weapons after the Cold War ended;
And that Russia used biological weapons, both against the Germans during WWII and against the Afghans during the Soviet invasion. In the first case, an attack on German Panzer troops ultimately ended up sickening far more Russian civilians than enemy soldiers.

Alibek’s book also provides considerable insight into the character of the Soviet system of government, including military and security matters. His perspective as an insider in the system is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, including his account of American inspections of Biopreparat facilities (and how he helped to trick them) and the Soviet inspections of US facilities like Fort Detrick that followed.

The book does have some flaws. As with any document on sensitive security matters, it is impossible to know how much of what is claimed is really accurate. Furthermore, this is the work of a defector, and Alibek goes to some length to try to highlight the good things he did. For example, he talks about trying to divert more of the production of a facility he ended up directing towards civilian medical purposes. He also omits any mention of the ‘Alibek’ strain of anthrax that he was responsible for developing. The book also jumps around chronologically in a way that can be confusing, and the chapter titles do not provide a very good sense of the content.

All told, Alibek’s book is interesting and worthwhile to read. It highlights how, alongside all the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, there was another separate type of appalling risk to civilian populations that had been created, and for which the legacy is enduring. Indeed, proliferation of biological weapons may well be a far more serious matter than proliferation of nuclear weapons. Building a working atomic bomb requires fissile material, knowledge, and engineering capability. By contrast, a biological weapon smuggled out of a lab in the pocket of an underpaid Soviet scientist can be duplicated to mass quantity in fermentors, with relatively little technological sophistication required.

That being said, it is worth nothing how biological weapons haven’t yet seemed to live up to their frightening potential. Alibek mentions the Japanese Aum cult as an example of a non-state entity that developed biological capabilities, and yet their attempts to actually employ biological agents failed to produce significant damage. That said, weapons in the hands of states like Russia that have had sophisticated weaponization and testing programs for decades are likely much more dangerous, as all the deaths from the accidental Sverdlovsk anthrax leak illustrate.

The book talks very little about delivery systems for biological agents; quite possibly, that is in response to the particular sensitivity of such information, which may not yet be in the hands of groups that do have access to dangerous strains of bacteria and viruses. Alibek explains that:

Bioweapons are not rocket launchers. They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents. (p.97 paperback)

He goes on to explain that detailed recipes for the production and weaponization of biological agents were developed by Biopreparat, and that they were retained by the Russian government even after the collapse of communism. In a few months time, facilities re-purposed for civilian use could go back to making smallpox, anthrax, and plague by the tonne.

In light of the increasing authoritarianism of the Russian government, this book makes especially worrisome reading. Back in the Soviet era, the government blamed the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak on ‘contaminated meat.’ Black market vendors were even punished for their supposed role in causing the disaster. For a span after the fall of communism, the reality that it arose from a leak in a bioweapon production plant was acknowledged. More recently, the government has gone back to the old contaminated meat deception.