Category: Security

Security is immunity from the will of others.

Profiting illicitly from chance

Canada's eternal flame, Parliament Hill

Skimming through a local newspaper the other day, I came across an advertisement for ‘investment advice.’ Basically, it was someone hoping to manipulate random chance to make a profit. It worked like this:

  • You sign up and, for the next month, you get free weekly investment advice.
  • You are encouraged to either invest according to the advice or pretend that you have done so, keeping track of the relevant stocks and how much you would have earned if you had invested.
  • After the free trial period, you start paying a fee for further advice.

The system works in a pretty obvious way. The people running it either produce one weekly piece of advice or, if they are smarter, many. They then send this information to people at random. Naturally, some of the advice will lead to real or simulated losses. Those people will stop taking the advice. Some people, however, will receive seemingly good advice week after week. These people, impressed with the ‘track record’ of the financial advisors will presumably start paying for the information, perhaps giving up when things inevitably go wrong.

You could perform the same trick with any random and money-connected activity: betting on races or sporting events, commodity prices, and so forth. In every case, enough random sets of advice being distributed will lead to a subset of people winning on the basis of the ‘advice’ several times in a row.

At one level, this is a pretty simple confidence trick. At the same time, it isn’t hugely different from what a lot of legitimate financial firms do from day to day. Buying mutual funds, in particular, bears similarities. People evaluate funds based on their past performance, despite how that may have been the product of chance rather than good choices. At least some mutual funds will always do well, driving people to believe that money can be made with them. In fact, mutual funds are more insidious than the con described above. That is because they charge management fees. As a result, there are likely to be many circumstances in which fund managers are getting paid on a day-to-day basis for making trades that underperform the market.

Incidentally, a related trick could be performed with fake medicine: offer it to sick people for free, to begin with, then start selling it to the ones who happen to see their condition improve significantly for unrelated reasons during the ‘treatment’ period. This would work especially well with chronic conditions where the level of suffering varies significantly from one point in time to the next.

Closing Guantanamo and reining in the CIA

Not only did Barack Obama order the closure of Guantanamo Bay, he has also ordered that secret CIA prisons be closed and that the CIA must abide by the Army Field Manual in conducting interrogations. The latter decision closes a serious loophole in the human rights policies of the previous administration.

While there are a lot of tricky decisions left to be made about exactly how the prisons will be closed, who will be tried, who will be released, and where, this is a major step towards American rehabilitation in the eyes of the world. Hopefully, this will underline the fact that the Bush policies on torture and imprisonment were an aberration from the overall American approach. Of course, their injustice could be highlighted all the more effectively through the prosecution of some of the people who illegally implemented and oversaw them to begin with.

Greyhound’s pointless security

On my way to Toronto last weekend, I was subjected to Greyhound’s farcical new ‘security screening.’

People were made to stand in a line in front of a roped-off area. One by one, they removed metal objects from their pockets, placed them in a dish, and had a metal detecting wand waved over then. At the same time, another security person spent a couple of second poking around in the top few inches of the person’s carry-on bag. The person then entered the roped-off area, carrying their carry-on and checked bags with them, waiting for the rest of the line to be processed.

Ways to get a weapon past this system:

  • Get one not made of metal, like a ceramic knife, and put it in your pocket.
  • Put it below the top few inches of your backpack.
  • Hide it inside a hollowed-out book, inside a piece of electronics, etc.
  • Put it in your wallet. With a wallet that can take an unfolded bill, you could fit a few flat throwing knives.
  • Tape it to the bottom of your shoe.
  • Put it in your checked baggage, remove it while you are waiting on the far side of the line.
  • Go through the screening, ask to go use the bathroom, collect your weapon, and return to the ‘screened’ area.
  • Before entering the bus station, hide a weapon outside, in the vicinity of where your bus will pull in. Pick it up before boarding.
  • Use a weapon that is both deadly and innocuous: such as a cane, umbrella, or strong rope.
  • Get on at a rural stop, instead of Ottawa.
  • Get on in Toronto, instead of Ottawa, since they don’t seem to be bothering with the screening there.
  • Etc.

I am not saying that people should actually bring weapons on Greyhound buses, and I am most certainly not saying that Greyhound should tighten their security to make these tactics useless. I am saying that the new screening is nothing more than security theatre. It does nothing to make Greyhound buses safer, though it will add needlessly to ticket prices.

On a more philosophical level, it also perpetuates the kind of low-freedom, security-obsessed society that many people seem to expect. It would be far healthier to acknowledge that the world contains risks while also noticing that countermeasures to reduce those risks have real costs, whether in hard currency or in convenience or privacy or liberty.

Planning for accidents

Backlit pine needles

Over at Gristmill, there is a good article about planning in the face of possible accidents. Specifically, it discusses the massive coal ash spill in Tennessee. The article stresses how responsible planning must make a genuine attempt to estimate the probability of a catastrophic accident taking place, as well as the likely consequences of such an accident. Excluding worst-case scenarios from planning makes it likely that plans will go forward which are unacceptably dangerous. It also makes it more likely that possible defences against a serious accident will not be established.

Many of these points are similar to ones made about financial risk by Nicholas Taleb. In both cases, there are very serious risks associated with making plans on the basis of ‘ordinary’ outcomes, while ignoring the possibility that things will become far worse than you anticipated.

Some security related reading

Shadow outline on buildings

Here are a few interesting and long security related documents which have recently become available. They are all in PDF format:

I will post something more original as soon as possible.

Obama and Israel-Palestine

Einstein doll

Expectations of the Obama administration could hardly be higher: both in terms of domestic promises (fixing health care, etc) and international ones (fixing climate change, etc). Successfully addressing a good number of the pressing issues facing the United States would make for a very successful presidency. That being said, it may be overly optimistic to hope for progress on all fronts. There is only a limited amount of time even the most energetic and capable administration has, and there is always the need to negotiate with other actors, most importantly the US Congress. In the end, it is better to make strong and durable progress on a smaller subset of issues than to make a weak and easily reversible advance on many more.

It seems to me that one area where Obama should consider limiting his engagement is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The region is undeniably in crisis, and there is most definitely both severe human suffering and considerable injustice ongoing. That being said, it is not clear that Obama could contribute usefully to reducing either, and it is clear that attempts to do so are time consuming and costly, in terms of political capital and energy. In order to get a sense of that, one need only look at the amount of effort some past presidents have put into the region (Clinton and Carter, for instance) and the very limited long-term results from them doing so.

If anything, the current situation in Israel and Palestine is even more fractured, unstable, and volatile than has been the norm in recent decades. In addition, the political leadership of the Palestinians is fractured in two, with Hamas openly advocating a second Holocaust. Given the absence of a situation conducive to negotiations, the prospects to do anything more than somewhat reduce the level of violence are very limited. With that in mind, perhaps the best course for Obama to take would be to send a respected special envoy to the region to try and contribute positively, while devoting his own time and attention elsewhere. Certainly, it makes sense to reiterate the most important points for an eventual resolution (a two state solution, demolishment of many settlements, an end to violence, etc), but pushing to achieve these things within the next four years seems far more likely to be a distraction than a path to accomplishment.

To those who will disagree, I ask what specifically Obama should do to produce outcomes that are better than those that would be achieved through the approach above.

“Chuckie” Taylor and torture prosecutions

An American court has convicted the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor for committing torture, sentencing him to 97 years in prison. “Chuckie” Taylor led a paramilitary unit during the time when his father was in power. His father is currently on trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. If there is any fairness in the world, “Chuckie” should eventually have some senior Bush administration officials for cellmates

The illegality of torture under international law is unambiguous. It doesn’t depend on which statutes a particular state has ratified; further, there are no exemptions granted for heads of state, senior officials, or people acting in a professional capacity. It certainly is not a legal defence to claim that the torture was necessary for purposes of national security or preventing terrorism.

The environmental and ‘anti-war’ movements

Spiky plant in snow

Historically, there seem to be a fair number of areas of overlap between various aspects of the environmental movement and various aspects of the ‘anti-war’ movement. It seems important, from the outset, to stress that neither is really a unified force. There are a few people who still aspire to the complete abolition of war, while most others have the ambition of either stopping specific wars or curtailing some of the worst aspects of war in general (war crimes, nuclear weapons, etc). On the environmental side, there is arguably even more diversity. People differ on areas of concern (does animal welfare matter?), on the scale of action (local? national? global?), and on appropriate solutions. Overlapping with both camps are some groups (such as Marxists) who feel that changing some underlying aspect of society will address most or all of the problems of war and environmental destruction more or less automatically.

There are a few reasons for which the anti-war movement is a natural fit for the environmental movement. For one thing, they tend to galvanize the same type of people: predominantly students and older people of an anti-establishment bent. More concretely, there is also strong evidence that war causes environmental destruction and that some types of environmental degradation can encourage wars.

That being said, there are also reasons for which the environmental movement might be wise to distance itself from anti-war campaigners. For one thing, there is the danger of getting drawn into debates that are largely irrelevant from an environmental perspective: dealing with climate change is hard enough without needing to factor in the rights and wrongs of the Gaza Strip or Kashmir. For another, a lot of the anti-war movement functions in an extremely confrontational way. Of course, the same is legitimately said about elements of the environmental movement. While such agitation might be necessary to get things started and keep people honest, it tends to become counterproductive once you reach the point of implementing any specific policy.

Finally, there is a bit of a dated quality to the anti-war movement. It feels bound up with Woodrow Wilson, on one side, and the LSD of the 1960s on the other. Certainly, the idea that war can be eliminated as a phenomenon (or even as a tool of policy for rich democratic states) is no longer considered plausible by many people. Similarly, the idea that all wars are fundamentally unjust is hard to maintain given evidence of recent occurrences that (a) could have been stopped through the just application of force and (b) were themselves significantly worse than an armed confrontation would have been. What seems sensible in a post-Holocaust, post-Rwandan genocide world is the advancement of a ‘just war’ agenda, focused on using law and evolving norms of behaviour to avoid unjust wars as well as unjust behaviour in a wartime environment. In practical terms, this involves mechanisms like the arrest and trial of war criminals, interventions to stop genocide, and agreements to eliminate certain weapons and tactics.

A ‘just war’ movement would certainly find areas for profitable collaboration with environmental groups. Many kinds of weapons are of both ecological and humanitarian concern, for instance. What is necessary is a higher degree of nuance and consideration than exist on the activist side of both movements. Hopefully, more mature and sophisticated arguments and tactics will be able to generate progress in reducing the harm from both armed conflict and environmental degradation.

Are embassies still necessary?

Dylan Prazak

This Vanity Fair article discusses the evolution of American embassies from open glassy structures intended to be a concrete reflection of American values into fortresses that almost completely isolate those inside from the country hosting them. This is certainly true of the new embassy in Baghdad. It has its own electricity and water supply and it is sharply isolated from even the ‘Green Zone,’ which is itself a fortress for foreign occupiers. The article goes on to ask whether embassies are even really necessary, in this age of mass communications:

Faced with the failure of an obsolete idea—the necessity of traditional embassies and all the elaboration they entail—we have not stood back to remember their purpose, but have plunged ahead with closely focused concentration to build them bigger and stronger. One day soon they may reach a state of perfection: impregnable and pointless.

There is certainly something to the argument. If the people working there are completely out of contact with the local population, they may as well be located in their home state. Due to security concerns, day to day matters like visas and assistance for tourists are increasingly handled at locations aside from embassies. Perhaps all ambassadors need these days is some secure office space, a home in a well defended gated community, and the ability to rent facilities where large social functions could take place. Eliminating embassy compounds would remove a tempting target for terrorists, and allow a lot less diplomatic and local staff to be retained.

In the end, the two key questions seem to be:

  1. Do embassies still do anything that couldn’t be accomplished by fewer people in less specialized secure facilities?
  2. Do any of those enduring purposes justify the risk and expense now associated with embassy construction and operation?

It seems to me that the answers may be ‘not much’ and ‘often, no.’ The most important remaining role for many embassies may be in espionage: snatching up nearby radio transmissions and providing some land that operates under the legal regime of the ambassador’s home state.

Torture, psychology, and the law

Morty wants a treat

For the darkest day of the year, a couple of torture-related items seem appropriate. Firstly, there is this New York Times piece, which argues that senior officials from the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes, for authorizing and enabling torture. The editorial argues that there is no chance that prosecutions will be sought under an Obama administration, but that he ought to clarify the obligation of the United States and its agents to uphold the Geneva Conventions, as well as reverse executive orders that “eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.”

The prospect of high-level American decision-makers being put on trial for authorizing torture is so unlikely that it is a bit difficult to even form an opinion about it. At the same time, it is likely that nobody thirty years ago would have anticipated the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), or International Criminal Court (ICC). There is no clear reason for which high political office should be any impediment to being tried for war crimes, but it is very unclear how any such prosecutions would fare in the United States. It would certainly be seen as a ‘political’ act, and any connections with international law would likely be the targets for special criticism and scorn from some quarters.

The other story worth mentioning is an experiment conducted by Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University. It was a less intense re-creation of Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. Like Milgram, Burger found that a startling proportion of the population is willing to torture a fellow human being as part of a scientific experiment. This is when the only pressure placed upon the subject of the experiment is the authority of the actor pretending to conduct it. That naturally makes one nervous about what people would be willing to do when they felt an urgent and important issue justified it, as well as when far stronger sanctions could be brought against them if they did not proceed.