Mark

Oshkosh b’ Gosh

Security & Intelligence / /

The Cold War really was an amazingly strange time. I was alive during that time, but I was too young to really understand what was going on. If I was older and I was aware of some of the things that are now known about that time, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. A while back I read a book about submarine espionage called Blind Man’s Bluff, and I was shocked by the daring and audacity of our submarine forces.

One story in particular caught my eye. Operation Ivy Bells was a 1970s U.S. Navy and NSA plot to bug Soviet underwater communications cables in the Sea of Okhotsk*. Submarines periodically serviced the device and recovered tapes from it, providing U.S. Intelligence with tons of valuable data. Its an utterly fascinating story, and it demonstrates yet again America’s reliance on technology. (There is much more to the story than I will go into here, but I wrote a more detailed summary at E2. Read the whole thing, as they say… but if you really want to get into details, you should check out the book)

The wildly successful cable tapping operations in the Okhotsk was eventually discovered by the Soviets in the early 1980s. It was originally thought that the discovery was caused by a U.S. submarine mishap in which a sub fell on the cable (*ahem*), but when all the intelligence was analyzed, that explanation just didn’t fit. In 1985, U.S. authorities arrested Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA employee who had sold out the Okhotsk cable tapping operation to the Soviets for $35,000. Yes, the Soviets were able to uncover one of our most important secrets for a paltry $35,000. Another spy named John Walker (and a ring of friends and family members whom he had recruited) was also caught in 1985. Between the two of them, the Soviets were able to get just as good a look at our communications as we were of theirs, and they didn’t need to spend years of research, millions of dollars in investments in technology, and risk their submariners’ lives.

Now, the contrast between the ways the Soviets went about information gathering and the way we did is an interesting one. The Soviets used a low-tech, inexspensive methodology that was very successful (a defecting KGB agent referred to the Walker ring as “the most important espionage victory in KGB history.”) The U.S. spent millions of dollars in technology and research, then daringly entered Soviet waters to place the taps. The U.S. method was just as successful, but more costly. Then again, the research and technology that enabled the cable tapping operations weren’t exclusive to these missions.

Its an interesting example of how a secure system can be undone by simple human interactions, isn’t it?

* Okhotsk was typically mispronounced as “Oshkosh” by those who partook on these missions (hence the title of this post and a chapter in the book)

Amazon’s Meta-Reviews

Computers & Internet / /

Amazon.com and the New Democracy of Opinion by Erik Ketzan : In this article, Eric Ketzan contends that Amazon.com book reviews “are invaluable documents in understanding what book reviews in periodicals could never show us: who is reading a book, why are they reading it, and how are they reading it.”

The present study seeks to analyze the way these reader reviews function: what are their goals, who is their audience, and how do they differ from traditional book reviews?

Since a comprehensive study of all reviews available on Amazon.com would be absurd, he chooses to examine the 133 reviews available for Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. The novel was chosen for the extremes of opinion which dominate people’s reactions to the novel, and thus provides us with a good, if somewhat unique, subject for an analysis of the Amazon system.

Indeed, the reviews for Gravity’s Rainbow are uncommonly descriptive and helpful, allowing insight into the type of person who enjoys (and doesn’t enjoy) this sort of novel. Indeed, many even give advice on how the novel should be read, and what to expect. The lack of an editor allows the tone of the reviews to be somewhat informal and thus you find it easier to relate to them than to a stuffy book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review…

Obviously, many (maybe even most) reviews at Amazon don’t quite live up to the standard that Gravity’s Rainbow sets. Its an extraordinary novel, and thus the resulting reviews are ripe for analysis, providing much information about the nature of the novel. One of the challenges of the novel, and a theme that runs throughout many reviews (professional and Amazon), is that it is essentially futile to review it in any conventional manner. Because of this, much of the commentary about it has to do with the peripheral experiences; people explain how they read it, how long it took them to do so, what effects it had on their lives, and what type of people will get it or not get it – none of which actually has much to do with the book iteself. We are able to get an uncanny picture of who is reading Gravity’s Rainbow, why are they reading it, and how are they reading it, but the book itself remains a mystery (which, basically, it is, even to someone who has read it). Other novels don’t lend themselves so readily to this sort of meta-review, and thus Amazon’s pages aren’t quite so useful for the majority of books listed there. One has to wonder if Gravity’s Rainbow actually was the best choice for this case study – sure, it provides a unique example of what Amazon reviews are capable of, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to the rest of the catalog… then again, the informal tone, the passion and conviction of those who love the novel, the advice on how to read and what else to read – these are things that are generally absent from professional book reviews, so perhaps Ketzan is on to something here…

Security & Technology

Best Entries, Neal Stephenson, Science & Technology, Security & Intelligence / /

The other day, I was looking around for some new information on Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson’s new novel, a follow up to Cryptonomicon) and I came across Stephenson’s web page. I like everything about that page, from the low-tech simplicity of its design, to the pleading tone of the subject matter (the “continuous partial attention” bit always gets me). At one point, he gives a summary of a talk he gave in Toronto a few years ago:

Basically I think that security measures of a purely technological nature, such as guns and crypto, are of real value, but that the great bulk of our security, at least in modern industrialized nations, derives from intangible factors having to do with the social fabric, which are poorly understood by just about everyone. If that is true, then those who wish to use the Internet as a tool for enhancing security, freedom, and other good things might wish to turn their efforts away from purely technical fixes and try to develop some understanding of just what the social fabric is, how it works, and how the Internet could enhance it. However this may conflict with the (absolutely reasonable and understandable) desire for privacy.

And that quote got me to thinking about technolology and security, and how technology never really replaces human beings, it just makes certain tasks easier, quicker, and more efficient. There was a lot of talk about this sort of thing around the early 90s, when certain security experts were promoting the use of strong cryptography and digital agents that would choose what products we would buy and spend our money for us.

As it turns out, most of those security experts seem to be changing their mind. There are several reasons for this, chief among them fallibility and, quite frankly, a lack of demand. It is impossible to build an infallible system (at least, it’s impossible to recognize that you have built such a system), but even if you had accomplished such a feat, what good would it be? A perfectly secure system is also a perfectly useless system. Besides that, you have human ignorance to contend with. How many of you actually encrypt your email? It sounds odd, but most people don’t even notice the little yellow lock that comes up in their browser when they are using a secure site.

Applying this to our military, there are some who advocate technology (specifically airpower) as a replacement for the grunt. The recent war in Iraq stands in stark contrast to these arguments, despite the fact that the civilian planners overruled the military’s request for additional ground forces. In fact, Rumsfeld and his civilian advisors had wanted to send significantly fewer ground forces, because they believed that airpower could do virtually everything by itself. The only reason there were as many as there were was because General Franks fought long and hard for increased ground forces (being a good soldier, you never heard him complain, but I suspect there will come a time when you hear about this sort of thing in his memoirs).

None of which is to say that airpower or technology are not necessary, nor do I think that ground forces alone can win a modern war. The major lesson of this war is that we need to have balanced forces in order to respond with flexibility and depth to the varied and changing threats our country faces. Technology plays a large part in this, as it makes our forces more effective and more likely to succeed. But, to paraphrase a common argument, we need to keep in mind that weapons don’t fight wars, soldiers do. While technology we used provided us with a great deal of security, its also true that the social fabric of our armed forces were undeniably important in the victory.

One thing Stephenson points to is an excerpt from a Sherlock Holmes novel in which Holmes argues:

…the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful country-side…The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish…But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the

wiser.

Once again, the war in Iraq provides us with a great example. Embedding reporters in our units was a controversial move, and there are several reasons the decision could have been made. One reason may very well have been that having reporters around while we fought the war may have made our troops behave better than they would have otherwise. So when we watch the reports on TV, all we see are the professional, honorable soldiers who bravely fought an enemy which was fighting dirty (because embedding reporters revealed that as well).

Communications technology made embedding reporters possible, but it was the complex social interactions that really made it work (well, to our benefit at least). We don’t derive security straight from technology, we use it to bolster our already existing social constructs, and the further our technology progresses, the easier and more efficient security becomes.

Update 6.6.03 – Tacitus discusses some similar issues…

Creeping Determinism & 9/11

Politics / /

Connecting the Dots by Malcolm Gladwell : A thoughtful counter-point to the arguments posited after 9/11 that the CIA and FBI failed to accurately assess all of the intelligence pointing towards a major terrorist attack. Gladwell argues that the clarity presented in these arguments, such as the one in the book The Cell or the passionate and detailed report made by Senator Richard Shelby in December, are an example of 20/20 hindsight, or what he calls “creeping determinism”. A term coined thirty years ago by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, creeping determinism refers to “the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable”.

Its an obvious point, but it operates on several levels, and almost every major war provides us with an example. We look back on the Union’s victory in the Civil War or the Allies victory in WWII with a sense of inevitability; that those victories were a foregone conclusion. But such was not the case. We all know the Allies won WWII, but such a conclusion was unthinkable in 1940 London, and the Union didn’t exactly thrash the South in the early days of the war. Of course, the concept is much broader and includes other situations than war as well…

So was the “intelligence failure” of 9/11 really a case of ineffective intelligence analysis, or just another example of creeping determinism? Its easy, in retrospect, to look back on the evidence of a major terrorist attack and conclude that our intelligence agencies failed to “connect the dots”, but what we are seeing is really a distortion caused by the clarity of all that evidence. What we are seeing is what is called in information theory, signal, and what we are not seeing is noise. Sure, there was lots of evidence pointing towards a major terrorist attack, but what we “don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the time but led nowhere.” When you get threats of bombings and attacks all the time, how do you distinguish between the signal and the noise? Which attack is the one that will actually happen? These aren’t limitations of our intelligence community, these are limitations on intelligence itself. “In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous.”

As such, there is no such thing as a perfect intelligence community. Every choice you make involves tradeoffs, and its not exactly clear which choices are the right ones. For instance, Shelby talks about the relationship between the CIA and FBI disapprovingly, noting their failure to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations. But Gladwell points out that it is just as easy to make a case for the old system, where organizations competed with one another. ” Isn’t it an advantage that the F.B.I. doesn’t think like the C.I.A.?”

As you can see, going over the evidence and the arguments can be frustrating. On the one hand, when you can look back on events knowing the outcome, the evidence seems obvious, but was it so obvious at the time? And why aren’t we fixing it now?

Today, the F.B.I. gives us color-coded warnings and speaks of “increased chatter” among terrorist operatives, and the information is infuriating to us because it is so vague. What does “increased chatter” mean? We want a prediction. We want to believe that the intentions of our enemies are a puzzle that intelligence services can piece together, so that a clear story emerges. But there rarely is a clear story–at least, not until afterward, when some enterprising journalist or investigative committee decides to write one.

There’s no way to fix the limitations of intelligence itself. We can make changes to our intelligence systems, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be making progress. We’re not so much solving a problem as we’re trading one set of disadvantages for another. The trick is figuring out which situation is beter than the other, which isn’t as easy as it sounds…

To hit or not to hit, that is the question

Best Entries, Culture / /

Gambling is a strange vice. Anyone with a brain in their head knows the games are rigged in the Casino’s favor, and anyone with a knowledge of Mathematics knows how thoroughly the odds are in the Casino’s favor. But that doesn’t stop people from dropping their paychecks in a few hours. I stopped by Atlantic City this weekend, and I played some blackjack. The swings are amazing. I only played for about an hour, but I am always fascinated by the others at the table and even my own reactions.

I don’t play to win, rather, I don’t expect to win, but I like to gamble. I like having a stack of chips in front of me, I like the sounds and the smells and the gaudy flashing lights (I like the deliberately structured chaos of the Casino). I allot myself a fixed budget for the night, and it usually adds up to approximately what I’d spend on a good night out. People watching isn’t really my thing, but its hard not to enjoy it at a Casino, and that’s something I spend a lot of time doing. Some people have the strangest superstitions and beliefs, and its fun to step back and observe them at work. Even though I know the statistical underpinnings of how gambling works at a Casino, I even find myself thinking the same superstitious stuff because its only natural.

For instance, a lot of people think that if a player sitting at their table makes incorrect playing actions, it decreases their advantage. Statistically, this is not true, but when that guy sat down at third-base and started hitting on his 16 when the dealer was showing a 5, you better believe a lot of people got upset. In reality, that moron’s actions have just as much a chance of helping other players as hurting them, but that’s no consolation to someone who lost a hundred bucks in the short time since that guy sat down. Similarly, many people have progressive betting strategies that are “guaranteed” to win. Except, you know, they don’t actually work (unless they’re based on counting, but that’s another story).

The odds in AC for Blackjack give the House an edge of about 0.44%. That doesn’t sound like much, but its plenty for the Casino, because they have an unfair advantage even if the odds were dead even. Don’t forget, the Casino has deep pockets, and you don’t. In order to take advantage of a prosperous swing in the game, you need to weather the House’s streaks. If you’re playing with $1000, you might be able to swing it, but don’t forget, the Casino is playing with millions of dollars. They will break your bank if you spend enough time there, even if they didn’t have the statistical advantage. That’s why you get comps when you win. They’re trying to keep you there so as to bring you closer to the statistical curve.

The only way you can really win at Blackjack is to have the luck of a quick streak and the willpower to stop while you’re up (as I noted before, if you’re up a lot, the Casino will do their best to keep you playing), but that’s a fragile system – you can’t count on that, though it will happen sometimes. The only way to consistently win at Blackjack is to count cards. That can give you the advantage of around 1% (more on certain hands, less on others) – depending on the House rules. This isn’t Rain Man – you aren’t keeping track of every card that comes out of the deck (rather, you’re keeping a relative score of high value cards to low cards), and you don’t get an automatic winning edge on every hand. Depending on the count, the dealer can still play consistently better than you – but the dealer can’t double down or split, and they only get even money for Blackjack. That’s where the advantage comes.

Of course, you have to have a pretty big bankroll to compensate for the Casino’s natural “deep pockets” advantage, and you’ll need to spend hundreds of hours practicing at home. Blackjack is fast and you need to be able to keep a running tab of the high/low card ratio (and you need to do some other calculations to get the true count), all the while you must appear to be playing normally, talking with the other players, dealing with the deliberately designed chaotic distractions of the Casino and generally trying not to come off as someone who is intensely concentrating. No small feat.

I’m not sure if that’d take all the fun out of it, not to mention draw the Casino’s attention on me (which can’t be fun), but it would be an interesting talent to have and its a must if you want to win. At the very least, it’s a good idea to get the basic strategy down. Do that and you’ll be better than most of the people out there (even if you just memorize the Hard Totals table, you’ll be in good shape).

State of the Blog

Weblogs / /

Recently, Steven den Beste updated his blogroll, then commented on the negative economy of scale and inverse network effect that allows his blogroll to be very valuable to those who are included. Naturally, given the value of those links, he gets a lot of mail from people asking to be put on the list. The reason he doesn’t do so is that the list would get very long and unwieldy (and thus the value of said link would go down), and also because “Sturgeon’s Law is in full force in the blogosphere: 90% of blogs are crap, if not an even higher proportion than that. (Not yours, of course.)”

I thought about that for a moment, and I realized that my blog is crap, part of that 90%. Not (I hope) because the content is low quality, but because it is so infrequently and inconsistently updated. At which point, I began examining what I’m doing here, why I’m doing it, and how I should proceed. I have not been very productive over the last year. There are many reasons for this, most of which contribute to my lack of motivation to produce more posts. One major factor in my lack of motivation is the fact that only a handful of people (if that) will ever actually see them, thus making the decision to blow off the blog that much easier.

I’ve been doing this for close to 3 years, and it has never really caught on. For a long time, I posted nearly every day. I didn’t worry about my lack of readership because I enjoyed what I was doing. And whatever feedback I did get was gratifying. Then things began to slow down, and now I’m stuck in a negative feedback loop where I don’t even want to be linked anymore because I don’t create enough high-quality content. But I don’t create enough high-quality content because I don’t have enough people visiting!

It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that is the general idea. I still enjoy doing the weblog, I just don’t do it enough. Even when I do, I’m terribly inconsistent. However, I think this is something I can correct. What I’m going to try to do is post at least once a week, on Sundays (anything beyond that is just gravy). Hopefully, being on a regular schedule will force me to consistently churn out worthwhile material. I also need to start creating more original high-quality content, as opposed to just linking to it (as I mostly do now). This will probably be a gradual thing, as I begin to comment more on what I link to. And thus I hope to bootstrap myself into superstardom. Or maybe just a few additional readers.

Desirable Instability

2 Comments / Politics / /

Stability, America’s Enemy by Ralph Peters : Perceptive and knowledgeable, Peters never ceases to amaze me. This essay is one of his classics, and in it he makes a compelling argument that a blind commitment to stability as and ends unto itself is not necessarily the best idea.

America’s finest values are sacrificed to keep bad governments in place, dysfunctional borders intact, and oppressed human beings well-behaved. In one of the greatest acts of self-betrayal in history, the nation that long was the catalyst of global change and which remains the beneficiary of international upheaval has made stability its diplomatic god.

As I noted below, the US has a tendency to hold stability sacred, and it has proved to be a mistake as we’ve strived to maintain a bad status quo. We need to lock Peters and Wass de Czege in room together and see what they come up with.

Peters, by the way, is the most intelligent commentator I’ve seen during this war. He has been writing editorials (such as this one) for the NY Post at a feverish pace, and though the pieces are less… polished than the above Parameters piece, they are no less perceptive. Its difficult to find previous pieces on the NY Post website, though. Perhaps I’ll try and collect some of his better ones, as they don’t seem to be inacessible…

Positive Ends

Military / /

Towards a Strategy of Positive Ends by Huba Wass de Czege and

Antulio J. Echevarria II [pdf version] : America’s role in the world today is a bit of a question mark, and it has been since the end of the Cold War. There have been a lot of proposals by defense planners in recent years, but few of them go beyond the Cold War paradigm of threat-based strategic thinking. Such proposals are based on preventative measures (deterring or defeating specific threats, for example), but prevention is a negative aim; this document proposes an effort of creating positive conditions, those that promote long-term peace, stability, and prosperity. The strength of such a strategy is that it would prevent many threats before they emerge in the first place. Interestingly, this strategy differs from its preventative alternatives in that it is oriented toward achieving a condition,

rather than preparing to respond to specific threats. The major weakness of this approach is that others could misconstrue its goals as a form of Pax Americana. Another weakness is that positive aims generally require more energy and resources than its alternatives do.

These weaknesses notwithstanding, a strategy built

around positive ends permits the United States to define its

vital interests in terms of conditions-such as peace,

freedom, rule of law, and economic prosperity-rather than

as the containment or defeat of inimical state or non-state

actors.

In theory, I rather like this optimistic approach, but there were some worrying aspects of the essay that make it seem as if a strategy of positive ends might not be as practically applicable as it may seem. In particular, though it does away with the Cold War notion of threat based analysis (which depends entirely on developing a correct list of threats and could fail when confronted with a new or emerging threat which our forces are not trained or equipped to handle), it stubbornly holds to the notion that stability above all is the most important factor of international policy. At a high level, of course, stability is something to be desired, but not at the expense of the overall good. Particularly worrying is the assertion that a good example of achieving positive ends is the non-military sanctions applied to Iraq during the 90s.

Still, this is an interesting proposal, but it’s worth noting that it was published in September of 2001, at which point, the world and America’s place in it changed drastically. Interestingly enough, one of the biggest triumphs of the present war in Iraq owes its success (at least partially) to the theories of one of the authors: Huba Wass de Czege. In 1982, Wass de Czege rewrote US Army doctrine, outlining a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines. In 1983, he founded the School for Advanced Military Studies, which was set up explicitly to start implementing this new doctrine. By the time Desert Storm got underway, his ideas had begun to take hold and were important to the ground campaign. When we went to Afghanistan, Wass de Czege’s ideas had taken an even stronger hold, as the campaign was truly a cooperative effort (one of his goals was to create a military which coordinated efforts between several branches of the armed services ) The most amazing thing about Operation Iraqi Freedom has been the agility, flexibility and active cooperation among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations.

Writing a new doctrine is one thing, but having it actually work on the battlefield is a true achievement, and one has to wonder how much weight ideas such as this strategy of positive ends carries… I suppose now is the perfect time to implement this strategy of positive ends; Iraq is truly in need of a serious commitment of resources and energy to bring about a peaceful, prosperous, free state, and such a commitment could seriously imply further reform on the region. If we’re able to overcome the weaknesses of this strategy (i.e., being portrayed as Pax Americana), I could see it succeeding…

Update 4.27.03 – More on the US mistake of valuing stability above all here.

Living in Historic Times

Culture / /

“Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still… isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited… and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to….” –

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, page 474.

Human beings tend to remember an uncompleted task better than a completed one, ostensibly because an uncompleted task has no closure, and thus our mind must continually work to acheive closure. This is a drastic oversimplification of what pyschologists call the Zeigarnik effect, and you can observe it in action in schools and restaruants across the world. Make a student take the same test he took the day before, and he’ll probably do much worse. There are all sorts of similar psychological theories and, depending on how liberally you apply them, you observe them in action all over the place.

Which makes me wonder, how will we remember this war twenty years from now? How will Bush be perceived? If things continue to go as well as they have, will history remember that this war was immensely unpopular in the world or the seemingly conflicting and ambigious motives of the US? Bush and the “Coalition of the Willing” experienced several setbacks in the months leading up to this war, but now, in hindsight, they seem small and insignificant. One of the few things I like about Bush is the way he reacted to these small setbacks. He barely flinched and kept his eye firmly on his long view. Perhaps an application of the Zeigarnik effect on a historical level, Bush recognized that people will only remember how something ends, not the events, setbacks and all, that led us there. We’ve had a spectacularly successful start, now we just need to make sure it ends right… [Pynchon quote from War Words]

Supercavitation

Science & Technology / /

Warp Drive Underwater by Steven Ashley : A long time ago, I wrote about Supercavitation here, but apparently missed this article, which covers the subject much more thouroughly. It focuses mostly on the military applications of this technology (though it is applicable to ocean farming and underwater exploration) and it contains a lot of detail on the most famous example of the technology, Russia’s VA-111 Shkval (Squall) rocket-torpedo. Some of the details are speculative, but they give a good explaination of the technology as well as some of the main applications, which include high-speed torpedoes, underwater machine-guns armed with supercavitating bullets to help clear mines, among other applications. Underwater mines are a serious nuisance, and an application such as the US RAMICS program would be a huge help… [via Punchstack]