climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Security is immunity from the will of others.
The way complex organizations assess technology and security is often very silly:
A: “Here is the signed document, as a PDF file that I scanned and emailed.”
B: “No good. We need a hard copy.”
A: “Well, I can mail one to you within about a week.”
B: “That’s far too long. Why don’t you just fax it?”
A boots laptop
A opens PDF file
A clicks ‘print,’ plugs laptop into telephone, sends the fax.
Result: a lower quality version of precisely the same thing is transferred, at greater expense.
It remains somewhat amazing to me that governments and major international institutions so frequently forget what it means to distribute documents in Word format. In particular, people are surprisingly ignorant of how Word tracks changes: making documents into a palimpsest of revisions, not all of which you want the outside world to see. You don’t want the comment about how pointless one of the ‘key items’ in your ‘corporate vision’ is making it into the file that gets passed to the New York Times. Even the early copy of the Summary for Policymakers of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC that I have includes a few notes about edits that still need to be done.
Hopefully, closed standards like Word documents will fall by the wayside during the next decade or so. It is insane to be distributing so much information in a proprietary format for no good reason (just one more manifestation of monopolistic dominance). Hopefully, whichever open document format eventually comes to be standard will have better means for assessing and controlling what information you are inadvertantly embedding in your press releases, reports, spreadsheets, etc. Until then, lax security is likely to keep offering some interesting glances into the drafting processes of such publicized documents.
PS. One other thing to remember is that the standard jpg images produced by Adobe Photoshop include thumbnail files that are not edited when you change the image. As such, a face blurred out of the large version may still be recognizable in the embedded thumbnail version. The same goes for areas that may have been cropped from the image entirely. I am sure Cat Schwartz isn’t the only person who has suffered public embarassment because of this. No doubt, many other pieces of software include such counter intuitive and potentially problematic behaviours.
No matter how much one tries to focus on the non-security bits of international relations, anyone who reads the news and is concerned about the world will get exposed to it pretty regularly. Yesterday, for instance, nine American warships carrying 17,000 military personnel were sent into the Persian Gulf. Some speculate that this was intended as a corollary to an announcement from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran’s ongoing nuclear program. The strike group included two Nimitz carrier battle groups and 2,100 marines in landing ships. The ongoing war games will apparently “culminate in an amphibious landing exercise in Kuwait, just a few miles from Iran.”
According to the IAEA, Iran has about 1,300 centrifuges online at Natanz, with another 600 likely to become available over the summer. Having 3,000 operational centrifuges would produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb per year.
The question of how to deal with challenges to the existing non-proliferation regime is an acute one. More and more states will gain the technical capacity to make bombs in the next few decades. Many will be in dangerous parts of the world, with hostile neighbours who can be plausibly expected to be building bombs of their own. Furthermore, the inability of the current regime to prevent the North Korean test raises the question of how much influence the international community really has, especially when some states are willing to become pariahs.
Prompted by my international law and developing world revision, I had another look at the eight Millennium Development Goals which were adopted by the 192 UN member states in 2000, and which are meant to be achieved by 2015. All eight are quite ambitious and represent worthy ambitions and intentions.
Some of the goals give themselves over easily to quantitative evaluation. For instance, reducing the maternal mortality ratio by three-quarters. While there are the ever-present concerns about data quality and the danger of people fudging their numbers, at least there is an empirically verifiable objective being targeted.
The environmental category (MDG7) has the general heading “Ensure environmental sustainability” and among the most vague provisions in the whole list:
To begin with, ‘sustainable development’ is not as objective a concept as it is sometimes considered. If it requires a society that could continue to operate in its present form indefinitely, then no society that exists today meets the standard. Of course, the term ‘development’ contradicts the idea of stasis. So too does the inclusion of the term in the MDGs generally, since all of them would require large-scale changes in both domestic and foreign policies.
When it comes to sheer vagueness, “reverse loss of environmental resources” must take the cake. What are ‘environmental resources?’ And what would ‘reversing their loss’ involve? With a few exceptions, such as the breakdown and slow recovery of stratospheric ozone, it is not terribly clear what this could mean. Even in cases where the general thrust of the idea seems applicable, such as reforestation or the protection of coral reefs from damaging fishing practices and increasingly acidic oceans, it doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance, or much of a standard for achievement.
Access to water
The second goal, about access to water, is much more in keeping with the qualitative targets that the MDGs generally seek to establish. A map of the world showing who has poor access to water and another showing the incidence of deaths from cholera demonstrates just how unequal quality and availability of water around the world is. All the technology required to provide safe drinking water to everyone exists. The degree to which the present situation is the result of a lack of will makes it a very appropriate target for a high-profile initiative like the MDGs.
While I have never believed that water is a likely cause for large-scale wars (countries that can afford to fight large-scale wars can afford desalination plants, which are expensive but cheaper than wars), there is every reason to believe that water will become a more acute problem in coming decades. One minor example is how a sea level rise of about 100cm could essentially eliminate Malta’s major sources of fresh water. Expect bigger problems in places like India or Bangladesh.
The Economist printed a good Survey on Water back in 2003. Accessing it requires a subscription.
Slum dwellers
Slums were mentioned here quite recently. Improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers is certainly a worthy aim. As many as 1.2 million people may live in just the Kibera slum in Nairobi. In sub-Saharran Africa, where more than 70% of the urban population already lives in slums, the rate is growing at 4.53% per year. Improving their lives probably requires two sets of approaches. One is based around providing basic needs, including water, health care, sanitation, lighting, security, and education. The other is based around reforming legal systems. Providing secure title to land, for instance, would likely reduce opportunities for bribery, provide access to credit, and generally reduce the level of insecurity in people’s lives. Actually implementing either set of approaches is an awfully tricky proposition, not least because of entrenched interests that value slums as a source of bribes from those who live there as well as a source of cheap labour for the city in which they are embedded. That being said, there are potentially huge improvements in human welfare to be achieved from success in this area.
All told, there seem to be a lot of reasons to be hopeful about the MDGs. They demonstrate, at least, that there is universal awareness within the international system about some of the most pressing problems of the present day. There is likewise at least some energy and initiative being committed to their resolution. The extent to which such efforts are successful will probably have a big impact on the kind of world in which we find ourselves in fifty years time: one in which most of humanity has reached a situation in which their basic needs are met and their basic rights are respected, or one that may be even more unequal and conflict-prone than the situation at present.
Today’s Strategic Studies Group meeting was unusually interesting. Lieutenant Commander Nigel JF Dawson was speaking about contemporary piracy and gave me specific permission to discuss it here a little. Basically, there are two hotspots of piracy in the world today: off the coast of Somalia and in the Malacca Strait. The latter waterway carries about 60% of world trade, including all the oil used by Japan and China.
Apparently, there are two major types of piracy happening in Southeast Asia. The first is simple enough: unsophisticated robbery of ships by individuals with few weapons and little organization. The second is much more dramatic: the wholesale capture of ships. Organized gangs steal whole oil tankers, repaint them, produce fake documentation for them, sell the cargo, and then sell or scrap the ships themselves. In the Malacca region, the unsophisticated kind of piracy is the norm south of the third parallel, while the region to the north involves mostly the larger scale sort. The character of piracy off the African coast was less thoroughly discussed. I have heard of an incident where the Tamil Tigers stole a ship containing a consignment of munitions for the Sri Lankan government.
A Piracy Reporting Centre in Malaysia apparently keeps track of all this, though only about one in four incidents are actually reported. I suppose it would make the clients of shipping companies nervous to learn that their cargo faces such perils.
It seems like the easiest way to target the problem would be to deal with the on-shore networks that support the trade. In particular, there must be ways to combat the wholesale expropriation and re-titling of ships. A global registry seems as though it would have a decent chance of being useful, at least when it comes to trade in huge oil and gas tankers.
The Lives of Others (Leben der Anderen, Das) is a potent and pertinent film: a reminder of recent history that speaks to ongoing questions about surveillance, as well as the human and inhuman aspects of state security organizations. The film is especially impressive because of the subtlety with which the topic is approached, and the space for contemplation it affords to the viewer.
The cinematography of the film is elegant to the extent that one is in danger of missing subtitles on account of preferring to keep one’s eyes where the film-makers wanted them. The only minor lapse in good judgment is in a few scenes where the use of very wide-angle lenses produces an unwelcome and disconcerting effect. The set designs, costumes, and performs are all extremely well chosen, really managing to convey a certain vision of life under the GDR.
The film struck me as a kind of inversion of Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) which I saw back in November of last year. One explores the moral dilemma of a member of Stasi, the infamous East German secret police, while the other is about a member of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist movement in the 1970s. In a way, both films are comments on how people can and do deal with the structures in which they find themselves. In particular, how exposure to the humanity and vulnerability of others affects one’s pre-existing convictions.
People in Oxford may find it useful to know that it is playing at the Phoenix Cinema on Walton Street until Wednesday May 9th.
Mac users, make sure you get the latest security patch from Apple. It covers some distinct vulnerabilities in terms of wireless networking, as well as patching several dozen general system and application vulnerabilities. You can read more about it here.
To get it, just click the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of the screen and then choose ‘Software Update’ from the menu that comes down. While being on a Mac does make you safer, it certainly does not make you invulnerable.
One of the great things about the internet is the ability to deal with information that is far too diffuse and voluminous to be processed in other ways. Indeed, that is the principal way in which modern computing qualitatively changes that we are able to do, as opposed to altering the rate at which we can complete a particular task.
Given those characteristics, it surprises me that nobody has come up with a site that catalogs serial numbers for all the kinds of products that include them: from bicycles to cameras to mobile phones. Such a site would allow users to enter that information when they purchased a product. It would then be on hand for warranty claims and in the event of loss or theft. People purchasing such items online, or in used good shops, could check the database to ensure that the products they are buying are not listed as stolen. Like eBay, it is much more efficient to have all these numbers sorted in a single place than to have numerous separate databases. The chances of a person trawling through many sites are low, but one well organized one could get masses of traffic. (See: network effect)
You could even imagine a system where online retailers like eBay are integrated with such a site. The listing for a camera would thus include a serial number linked to an entry in the database. If you bought the item, then received one with a different serial number from the one listed, you would be entitled to lodge a complaint and the seller would get flagged as a potential fraudster. I have personally avoided buying photographic equipment from eBay because I fear that a lot of it may be stolen. Having some simple protections like these in place would make me feel a lot better about it.
PS. For an example of an existing but limited serial number listing, see the stolen equipment registry over at Photo.net. It is unlikely that someone buying a cheap digital camera online will look at that (I knew it existed and it took me some searching around to find the URL), but perhaps someone buying an expensive tilt-shift lens for a medium format camera system will.
Grabbed from Metafilter, this page of maps distorted to show relative rates of things like military spending is quite interesting. Unsurprisingly, the map of war and death is especially grotesque.
Some higher resolution versions are over at Worldmapper: by total population, landmine casualties, and wealth (per capita).
Looking at these, one is immediately struck by how heterogeneous the world is. Of course, we all knew that before, but seeing the information in a new way can change one’s perception of it quite a bit. While there is the danger of such data being misleading, I would say it counters the greater danger of extrapolating from personal experience. Aggregated statistics, while not perfect, are a lot better than on-the-fly human intuitions, when it comes to assessing massive problems quite beyond the scope of anyone’s personal experience.
In case anyone doubts that the War on Terror creates situations straight out of Kafka, reading this article from The Guardian is in order. Sabbir Ahmed, a British citizen, was held in a detention centre for nearly two months because officials thought he was Pakistani and wanted to deport him there. He couldn’t prove that he was British because his passport was in his London flat and they offered him no other means by which to prove that he was, in fact, born in Blackburn as the son of two other British citizens.
He ought to be receiving some pretty heavy compensation, and high level apologies and/or sackings, for this kind of massive incompetence. Of course, this also speaks of institutional racism. Frances Pilling, chairwoman of the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees, said: “They chose not to pursue any avenue of investigation at all.” If he had been white and named John Brown, they might have accepted that he was from Blackburn after calling the Passport Office, or even some people there who would vouch for him.
It goes to show, yet again, that we have more to fear from government than from terrorists.
