Author Archives: Alex Harrowell

About Alex Harrowell

Alex Harrowell is a research analyst for a really large consulting firm on AI and semiconductors. His age is immaterial, especially as he can't be bothered to update this bio regularly. He's from Yorkshire, now an economic migrant in London. His specialist subjects are military history, Germany, the telecommunications industry, and networks of all kinds. He would like to point out that it's nothing personal. Writes the Yorkshire Ranter.

Even More DTAG Surveillance Scandal

Posted on by

The slow-motion Privacy Chernobyl at Deutsche Telekom goes on. Handelsblatt reports that investigators in the spying scandal there have discovered a document which proves that the company was spying on the members of its management board (Vorstand), as well as the members of the trade-union works council (Betriebsrat) and the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat), and a whole gaggle of financial analysts and business and tech journalists.

Hilariously, it turns out that one of the targets of the illegal surveillance was none other than the current finance director; the company has been unconvincingly trying to deny that anyone in the current management was involved. Now it looks like they were involved both as participants and as targets. Surveillance cultures get like that. It was bad enough when they were just doing table joins across Lufthansa and Deutsche Bahn records and every expense account in Germany, but what I find specifically offensive about this story is that one of the human sources the snoopers used was…a journalist.

It will come as no surprise that the stool-pigeon was from the Bild Zeitung; I can’t wait to hear what the BildBlog has to say.

A European option in Afghanistan

Posted on by

What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about. And at the moment, much of the international effort there is counterproductive and fairly immoral. Don’t ask me; ask hugely influential counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who makes the obvious point that air strikes into the Hindu Kush probably aren’t helping win the support of the people.

Surely, what we need is a solution under which a reasonable Afghan government would be left in place, the intrusion of foreign forces, their road convoys, fortified camps, heavy weapons, and inflationary spending removed, and as many pieces of the diverse coalition of forces that make up the Taliban reconciled? Perhaps there is one; but first, it’s necessary to remove some of our preconceptions. Everyone knows about Afghanistan, right? Soviet invasion, daring resistance, Western secret aid, eventual withdrawal in 1989, mujahedin triumph, and then it all goes horribly wrong.

Well, this is actually quite misleading. The war began before the Soviet intervention, and in a sense even earlier, in the form of the bitter internal troubles inside the Afghan communist movement. More importantly, the mujahedin/future civil warriors/further future Taliban didn’t win in 1989. To considerable surprise, they failed to take even one town from the Afghan government until 1992. Many important mujahedin leaders were willing to be reconciled with the government as long as the Red Army was withdrawn and, of course, the government made it worth their while. The ones who fought on only succeeded because all assistance to the Afghan government was cut off at the end of the Soviet Union – which included things like wheat, diesel fuel, cash, and ammunition.

In fact, the withdrawal was about the best idea the Soviets had in Afghanistan. Having decided to go, they pursued a policy of building up the Afghan government, changing the military strategy to one based on defending the bulk of the population (to stop this happening) and leaving the mountain wilds to the enemy, pouring in aid of all kinds, negotiation with those who were willing, and leaving a strong advisory mission in place. Here is a US Army study of the withdrawal (pdf); I should hope we could avoid providing the Afghan police with their own ballistic missiles. Seriously – the Najibullah government insisted on having its own Scuds, and assigned them to a unit of the secret police. They eventually fired over 300 of the things.

But the principles apply quite well. Turn down the intensity of the war. Don’t state an explicit timetable, to retain bargaining power. Pursue population security. Build up Afghan authorities. Deliver aid and a strong advisory mission. Open all-party talks. And start removing foreign combat forces. Interestingly, polls of Afghan public opinion, for what they are worth, seem to suggest this may be a good idea.

According to the US Army study, the continuing assistance to the Afghan government cost the Soviet Union about $3-4bn annually – obviously those are 1989 dollars, but in the light of the huge cost of maintaining manoeuvre brigades in Afghanistan (twice as much as Iraq), that’s got to be better. The Soviet aid airlift consisted of 15 Il-76 aircraft a day; currently about 15 mixed Il-76 and AN-12 head to Afghanistan from the UAE a day from the private sector. You could call it a civilian surge if you like; you could also call it ending the Afghan war, if you’re a German Christian Democrat. Certainly, you’d have to involve Iran from the word go – after all, they have the only railhead near Afghanistan and plan to build the railway on into the country. It could be the shortest way from Europe.

It’s got to beat more wedding parties, with the twist that the Russians get to play politics with every transit shipment. Speaking of Russians, however, the man we want to hear from is Makhmut Gareev, who led the Soviet advisors after 1989. Call it the European option.

a lost sheep back in the fold

Posted on by

Well, will you look at this? Remember Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who was the author of a proposal to implement total Internet surveillance in the EU, in order to make the French record industry happy? (I’m sorry to say I spelt his name wrong.) We beat that one. But now look at him – here’s a letter he sent to today’s Guardian.

Lord Woolf and his colleagues were right to point out that the recent erosions of civil liberties are “one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war” (Report, 6 February). We already have the largest DNA database in the world and, under the terms of the Prum treaty, more and more personal data can be shared with other EU member states.

It is vital that we weigh up whether we are sacrificing too many of our hard-won freedoms in our quest to tackle crime.
Dr Syed Kamall MEP
Con, London

Quite astonishing; Dr. Kamall has been saved as a brand from the burning. Did we turn him on to a weirder life? Or just scare him? Or has his local talking points cache been refreshed? Certainly, it’s a pretty impressive statement from someone who was looking for a mandate for compulsory deep-packet inspection throughout Europe only a few months ago.

We Have Steampunk Police Surveillance Movies

Posted on by

Our reader Chris Williams has an article out in Surveillance and Society about the early history of police surveillance on film in Britain. It’s a Europe-wide issue, but one which a lot of people both imagine is restricted to Britain and recent. But back in 1935, the police in Chesterfield were training 16mm cine cameras into the main market place…all in an attempt to catch illegal gamblers. Here is some of the footage.

Video thumbnail. Click to play

Click To Play

Zombie Meme Watch: Transatlantic Politics and Afghanistan

Posted on by

Hey, it’s the Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus meme again. This is what programmers call an anti-pattern – a classical, typical example of how to do something wrong. You might have thought that, with the Bush years finally behind us, this would have been retired at long last; but no. Now, the UK is being accused of becoming “Europeanised”, supposedly because it doesn’t want to put more troops in Afghanistan.

First, the UK cannot do this because, having spent the last 8 years chasing various US-inspired missions, it doesn’t have the troops, and more to the point, it doesn’t have the air transport fleet to support them in the interior of Asia. Simple. But more importantly, there are two huge unexamined assumptions here. The first is that the Europeans have to come when the US calls them. What is in it for us? After all, NATO declared that the alliance had been invoked back in September 2001, and was told that its assistance was not required, at the same time as hordes of rightwing publicists accused it of not helping. Then, later, the US accepted the need for an international peacekeeping force, which was led by European NATO members for most of its existence.

And then, the US withdrew much of its own forces in Afghanistan for use in Iraq. Specifically, the special forces whose mission in counter-insurgency and as military advisors was crucial in the vast majority of Afghanistan away from Kabul were drawn on, as were the satellite and other reconnaissance assets. This was a loss in awareness of what was happening out there that ISAF never really recovered; it is no coincidence that, as Antonio Giustozzi writes in Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop, the Taliban resurgence began in 2003.

Now, after several EU states have been prevailed on for troops and have sent many more, things seem to be worse. If, as they do, the Americans whine about having had to contribute to IFOR/SFOR in Bosnia (which consisted of two European divisions and a partly-US one), why should EU member states happily fork out for a much more dangerous, violent, expensive and uncertain commitment which is not much more remote from their real interests than Bosnia was to the US? If they don’t want NATO to be seen as a club for the furtherance of US interests out-of-area, this is not the right way to go about it.

Secondly, there is the question of whether more troops – anyone’s troops – will do any good. Even US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates is doubtful of that. After all, even with many more troops, they will still be spread very thinly, but they will create more of the perception of a blundering occupation with fortified bases and car-bashing road convoys and edgy privateer guards. More and more money will be spent in expanding the sector of the economy devoted to supplying “the internationals”. The strained and politically dodgy supply route through Pakistan will get even more strained and dodgy.

Further, the planned US “surge” is a surge; a temporary increase in forces. Surely, what is required is a sustainable solution – one that might serve our supposed goals after the captains and the kings depart as the US military’s arms-plot requires. And that is only going to be achieved through political and economic means. If EU states should contribute more of anything, it should be more advisors, more reconstruction aid, more doctors and engineers – not more wedding-party strikes-in-error, and the kind of combination of well-meaning NGOs, PRTs and other TLAs with chaos and sinister spookery Robert Young Pelton brilliantly evokes here.

Friends don’t let friends drink and drive; neither do they help friends get into open-ended two-front wars. Europeans are entirely right to behave as if Iraq and Afghanistan had erased US credibility, and to expect it to be earned back rather than freely given. They are also right to look to their wooden walls, or their reconnaissance satellites.

5,000 Terrorist Targets = War with Pakistan

Posted on by

Very, very worrying news from India and Pakistan. I especially don’t like all the stuff about school textbooks.

On Friday, India warned its citizens to stay away from Pakistan, claiming that they were in danger from agencies “that operate outside the law and civilian control”. Yesterday’s newspaper reports reflected increasingly frenzied war speculation. “Pak army on the march” was the headline in the Hindustan Times, while the Times of India – which led its Christmas Day edition with the headline “Pak whips itself into war frenzy” – reported that Pakistan had stepped up its “war moves”. Claims by Pakistan that Indian nationals had been arrested in connection with a Christmas Eve car bombing in Lahore were also angrily dismissed. Anand Sharma, an Indian external affairs minister, called the reports “hogwash”.

Although some in the Indian media have urged caution, there has been a spate of anti-Pakistan stories since the Mumbai attacks. Yesterday’s Times of India carried a front-page report headlined “Pak textbooks foster hate against India” which claimed that “venom against India is officially promoted to infect young minds in Pakistani schools” and asserted that terrorism in Pakistan had its roots in a culture of hate.

Yelling about the other side’s maps and school textbooks is a telltale symptom of nationalist hysteria. Also, look what the head of the Indian Air Force Western Command is saying:

Air Marshal PK Barbora, chief of India’s western air command, said that the air force had identified 5,000 terrorist targets inside Pakistani territory.

Five thousand terrorist targets? I’d bet there aren’t five thousand actual terrorists in Pakistan, as opposed to people who might agree with them, or think the Pakistani government is just looking for an excuse to bring its tax-collectors into their valley when it talks about terrorists. Terrorism is by definition a small-team pursuit; otherwise it wouldn’t be terrorism, it would be ordinary war.

Now, let’s remember a classic post on this blog. Back in February, 2007, the National Security Archive at George Washington University got hold of the original slides from the briefing document on war with Iraq. The heaviest air bombardment the planning study included foresaw 3,000 individual aiming points from 2,100 aircraft sorties, the difference being made up by an unknown mix of multiple-target missions and Tomahawk missiles. This was designed to wreck the Iraqi military and military-industrial complex thoroughly. The Pakistani officer here is suggesting a minimum of 5,000 aiming points.

Even compared to the Iraqi military-industrial complex at its hubristic height immediately after the Iran-Iraq war, with its nuclear programme, satellite-launch programme, T-72 tanks and indigenous airborne early-warning aircraft, it would be fair to say that the Pakistani one is a much more complex complex, with the benefit of years more investment and both US and Chinese support, to say nothing of the nuclear system and the secret AQ Khan procurement-network. So the first thing we have to conclude that Air Marshal P.K. Barbora is floating not just an operation directed at Lashkar-e-Toiba, or even ISI facilities, but a conventional blitz intended to wreck the Pakistani Air Force, the nuclear system, and as much of the ISI, the Army, the Navy and the defence industries and strategic infrastructure as he has aircraft left for.

Air Marshals always want this, of course. It goes without saying that he couldn’t launch something like this without an epic air battle and a ferocious Pakistani counterattack of some sort. Barbora’s command has a mixture of MiG-21, MiG-23/27, MiG-29, and SEPECAT Jaguar aircraft; the -21s, -23s and -29s are mostly assigned to air defence roles, the -27s to close support of the army, and the Jaguars are India’s premier strike aircraft. Among other things, their role includes carrying part of the nuclear deterrent. There are 108 of these; 6 are assigned to a maritime role in the Southern command. It is fair to say the rest will be facing Pakistan. An operation of this size would also involve the South-Western command and the Central command; the Central command controls most of the 110 Sukhoi 30 fighters and the 39 Dassault Mirage 2000-5 aircraft, some of which would be assigned a strike/attack role. The Sukhoi 30s are officially there as a pure fighter, but it’s unrealistic to imagine that given a latest-generation aircraft they won’t take any opportunity to get into the fray.

Therefore we can say there are about 150 serious strike aircraft available. There are also the four Tu-22M3 bombers, theoretically reserved for operations at sea. However, the fact the Russians lost one over Georgia may well dissuade them from looking for trouble. A big variable is the percentage of the MiG-27 fleet which will be held back for the Army – the Western command has many of them, but also has Kashmir and the critical Route 1 into Kashmir on its plate. Just using the Jaguars, Mirages, and any Sukhois assigned to the job, 5,000 aiming points would be attacked in 17 days at 2 sorties/aircraft/day. It’s fair to rule out many missions covering more than one target – this won’t be Afghanistan or even Iraq or even Iran. Pakistan has a lot of rather old but much-upgraded Mirage IIIs, Chinese-made MiG-21s, 44 F-16s (which are pre-1984 -A and -B models), and some very new Chinese JF-17s that really, nobody knows much about. Assuming 75% serviceability, it would be a theoretical 23 day campaign, but this doesn’t count the major commitment of fighters and defence suppression aircraft.

Clearly, however, there is no quick and relatively safe option. If Indian planning is anything like Barbora’s remarks, this means major war, with the certainty of the biggest air battle in living memory, the near certainty of a major mountain battle in Kashmir, a significant risk of the armies fighting out a battle of manoeuvre further south, and some risk of nuclear war.

I finished that post by saying that there would probably be no war with Iran. I can’t say that about India and Pakistan.

artificial eye

Posted on by

On the topic of European innovation, this demo application from the Nokia Forum rocks. Basically, it uses the Sensor API in the latest version of Symbian S60 and the phone camera to detect what you’re pointing the cam at, and show information related to it.

Tagging Barcelona

Tagging Barcelona

Naturally this information could be sucked in from the Web, which opens up the healthy possibility of not just user-generated, but unofficial user-generated markup for the cityscape with constant feedback. A simple implementation might do something like hashing the geographical position of the feature with its direction and appending that to a selected URL.

The real purpose of this is surely the old Surrealist aim, to bring the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible; to put in the horrible details of how that particular bank wants to pass the SKU of the item you just bought back to headquarters with the credit card authorisation request, all for your own good, or how the owners of such-and-such a monster warehouse ordered the staff to moon for the camera because the newspapers wrote bad things about them. (I agree, these examples are prosaic, but then, that’s me.)

The United States, Screwdriver Economy of the Web?

Posted on by

A sad and undignified tale from LeWeb3; it’s chilly and the conference WLAN doesn’t work, so a whole gaggle of US microsleb gadgetbloggers staged a queeny flounce. And, of course, it’s all more evidence of the eventual demise of Europe. Isn’t it always? Not so long ago, we were apparently faced with the French civil war as the first wave of the Muslim takeover. Oddly enough, the riots in Greece don’t count – the wrong kind of suntan, I suppose.

Charles Arthur points out, sensibly, that a hell of a lot of the technologies that all the other Web 3.14159 tiddlers rely on are the products of European innovation. Linux started in Finland, Skype in Estonia and Sweden, MySQL in Sweden, PHP with a Dane in Greenland.

But that’s far from an exhaustive list; he could have mentioned Python, which originates at the Dutch National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in 1991, the KDE desktop for Linux from Tübingen, the KML geo-descriptive language which underpins Google Earth, Google Maps, and which might have originated with an idea of Chris Lightfoot’s which I can’t now trace, GSM, UMTS and LTE mobile phone networks – so let’s leave it at the OpenStreetMap, the Symbian and UIQ mobile device operating systems, the world’s best political software team at MySociety, and even Internet exchanges themselves.

(It’s just come to mind that I use all of these.)

After all, most of the European delegates at LeWeb3 would have had their own HSPA cellular data dongles on hand; as a regular tech conference attendee, I’d say nothing is more likely than crappy Wi-Fi service, especially if it’s provided by a commercial hotspot firm who happen to have a presence in the building. There is never enough capacity, and usually it’s the combination of the Web server that serves up the login page and the RADIUS (or whatever) box that does the provisioning that fails under pressure.

But, sadly, the US delegates wouldn’t, because they don’t have proper mobile telephony there. Well, I’m taking the piss; there’s a good European company like T-Mobile, who even refused to take part in the illegal call-record analysis. I’m still taking the piss – but only a little now.

Steinbruck twisting in the wind…

Posted on by

German finance minister Peer Steinbrück has made some enemies lately, giving an interview in which he accused the UK of “crass Keynesianism” and complained that it had spent so many years lecturing the rest of the EU about fiscal rectitude. The last bit’s pretty cheeky from a German finance minister, after all those years of Hans Eichel and the Bundesbank directors wagging their fingers at those irresponsible southerners, but let’s let it pass. Steinbrück got called into the British embassy, but very soon he had more serious problems.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment; what were his motivations? The first thing to remember is that an EU member state spends on average about 20% of GDP on imports from other members. The second is that industrial exports make up a really big chunk of the German economy. So if you’re Germany, and you don’t think the recession will be quite that bad, there’s an argument for sitting tight and enjoying about 20% of everyone else’s fiscal stimulus. Obviously the net leakage will vary depending on the exact details; a consumer-side stimulus like the UK one will probably leak more, a public works one like the French rather less, in so far as it’s labour-intensive and therefore nontradable. If, however, it involves buying a lot of Repower wind turbines, QCells solar panels, or Siemens trains and control electronics, well, perhaps not so much.

And arguably the UK consumer sector is less likely to import from Germany than it is from the world dollar zone, specifically China. The main exception is cars, but new car purchases are almost all on credit, and the sector is currently credit-rationed. So perhaps he was talking his own book? Surely, however, in this case he wouldn’t have attacked the stimulus in general. Another possibility is that he’s thinking of German politics. The more the rest of Europe stimulates, the more pressure on Steinbrück to do likewise – from the coalition partners, from the French, and from the SPD membership. After all, down at the provincial level, there have been rumblings for weeks about the NRW state government buying into the Opel plants if GM goes bust; the car industry is hugely important and it’s in deep trouble.

The French. Well, as Le Monde reports, Germany is being placed under intense diplomatic pressure by France and the UK. It’s a little-remarked on aspect of the crisis that Anglo-French relations have become very good, a continuation of a Blair government trend. Politically, it’s much more acceptable for a German government minister to have a public row with the British – but as the Le Monde article makes clear, there is considerable tension between France and Germany. So much so that Merkel publicly reiterated a commitment to Europeanness in a recent press conference.

So why is he clinging to the point? Probably because he wants to go into an election with a balanced or close to balanced budget as an accomplishment he can stick a big red SPD flag in, and not incidentally, write his name on. This implies he’s thinking of fighting the election across the centre ground, trying to score off the CDU and FDP, rather than trying to regain ground from the Left. But is this at all realistic? In an interview with Der Spiegel, none other than Paul Krugman declared that both Steinbrück and Angela Merkel have underestimated the seriousness of the situation. Der Spiegel also claims that the government is expecting a deficit of 3% of GDP. Elsewhere, on his own weblog, Krugman deployed the ultimate economic rhetorical weapon – The Economic Consequences of Herr Steinbrück, no less. Meanwhile, the chief economist of the OECD chipped in as well.

The upshot? What have we here? A €30bn German fiscal shot is apparently being prepared; note that the work is going on between Merkel’s office, the (conservative) Minister of the Economy, and the coalition partners, cutting Steinbrück and the Finance Ministry out of the process. Of course, he retains the power of the purse, but then, Merkel retains the Richtlinienkompetenz and could stick a directive down his shirt front. (Which appears to be what Nicolas Sarkozy is expecting.) Or he could be sacked. Either course would leave the SPD faced with a choice between its cabinet-level leaders and its membership; fighting for Steinbrück’s authority could involve fighting an election on a promise of fiscal restriction, just as millions of IG-Metall members are terrified of losing their jobs.

After all, down in the microeconomy, BMW is about to offer emergency funding to its suppliers and dealerships in an effort to prevent a wave of bankruptcies. ZF, the gearbox maker, is worried both about its unpaid bills from the car makers and also about the availability of credit to its subcontractors. Today’s meeting at the Kanzleramt looks like it’s going to be tasty, to say the least.

Really Sick Buildings

Posted on by
The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin

The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin

An artefact is an ideology made manifest. The bell in this picture is the one made for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, installed in the bell tower you can see behind it, brought crashing down when the damaged tower was demolished shortly after the second world war, repaired, and eventually rededicated as a monument “against war and violence”. But it’s not only that.

The bell was forged by the Gussstahlfabrik in Bochum, the heart of the Krupp steelworks, and the plant which made the Prussian and German armies’ gun barrels. Its owners and top managers were a crucial influence in German politics, from the turn away from Bismarckian conservatism in the 1890s all the way to 1933. It was there that the revolutionary centrifugal casting process – spinning molten steel from a tube turning at thousands of RPM outwards like candy floss – was invented in the 1930s, that made the Nazi army’s 88mm long-range antitank guns. Ordering the bell from them was political architecture in many ways – not only did it please the heavy industry lobby, it explicitly reminded everyone of the real sources of the state power the whole master plan was meant to celebrate. The bell tower itself grows out of a war monument; but the bell grew out of the military-industrial complex.

Even its later history is telling. Despite the RAF bombing, which damaged the structure, it was still standing when the Olympic stadium was taken over by the British army, just as the bombers could never really finish off the steelworks that made it. The British blew it up for fear it would fall down unpredictably. Later, in the 1960s, it was restored – by none other than Werner March, the original architect of the project. No wonder people worried about faschisticher Kontinuitat. The bell itself was then, rather uneasily, plonked in its current position with its new and vaguely glib, but undeniably well-meaning mission; it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s been a lot like Germany.

Strangely enough, the Reichssportfeld is the only stone building that scares me. All my associations for it are wrong; I’m used to the stuff as a material which weathers, grows moss, turns black with industrial smoke, gets sandblasted back to its original colour by ambitious mayors. Although the stadium is limestone, like a Yorkshire hill, it’s still terrifyingly perfect.

Not much light

Not much light