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.

The European Parliament: It’s Doing Democracy

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Nobody likes the European Parliament, and that’s probably why everyone had such low expectations about the “telecoms package” it was meant to pass. There was all kinds of horrible gunk in there – the French government, for a start, had outsourced its policy to the owner of a chain of record shops, who decided that all ISPs should be required to cut off service to anyone they were told was downloading illegal music. Then, for some reason, British Conservative MEPs joined in; it looked like we were on our way to a continent-wide mandate for deep packet inspection, with various horrible lobbies getting access to the take.

Not any more. Hardly anyone’s bothered reporting this, but as heise.de was the first to report, it’s been successfully castrated, using a selection of targeted amendments. The “three strikes” proposal so dear to Nicolas Sarkozy and friends has been struck out, Malcolm Harbour’s attempt to pass everybody’s clickstream to the record industry killed off, and a guarantee that surveillance can only begin with the approval of a court inserted. There’s more (in French) here;

en vertu du principe selon lequel aucune restriction aux droits et libertés fondamentales des utilisateurs finaux ne doit être prise sans décision préalable de l’autorité judiciaire en application notamment de l’article 11 de la charte des droits fondamentaux, sauf en cas de menace à la sécurité publique où la décision judiciaire peut intervenir postérieurement

So you can’t intrude on the rights of end-users without getting a court order, except in case of a threat to public safety, in which case the courts can strike down your decision retrospectively. Great. It’s a cracking piece of work all right, especially for the various tiny and unreported campaign groups who dragged it on deck and the various Green and Leftist MEPs involved. Like Danny Cohn-Bendit.

The package was supported by the EPP, the conservative group in the EP, and the worst things in it were their ideas. The EPP has a significant majority; it’s well worth pointing out that flipping a prestigious piece of legislation like this in the face of a working majority just doesn’t happen in the House of Commons, dominated as it is by the whipping system.

So who’s left to cry, other than monopoly-minded lobbyists and spooks? The blogosphere’s own Tim Worstall, it turns out. In a spectacularly idiotic piece published in The Register, he takes the expert advice on public international law of woman-hating nutbag UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom and concludes that this statement means you’re not allowed to use Google.

“End-users are able to access and use services, including information society services, provided within the Community.”

His argument, if the word can be applied, is apparently that “Roman law” blah blah…but here’s the problem. It doesn’t say that you’re allowed to use them, does it? There is no value judgment in there. Strangely, nobody in the night-haunted tyrannies of the rest of Europe has ever found this a problem, either. For example, I’m able to stab the next man on the street; but Timmeh’s logic would imply that this makes it legal to stab the Prime Minister, as I haven’t…whatever. This is so stupid and intellectually dishonest it just makes me feel tired.

But you have to cut him some slack. After all, typing “Britney Spears sex tape” into his spam blog must get tiring. For the Register, well. I still remember when it was a reasonably useful news source; more recently it’s declined into publishing arsewit climate change denial bollocks and rehashed ECHR-bashing from the Sun.

The people who actually did the fight on this occasion, La Quadrature du Net, deserve your thanks, Tim. But that’s in French, by the way.

The Revolution is Over

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It seems clear they done it; for God knows what reason – arrogance, hoping beyond hope, misjudgment – Georgia started something it couldn’t finish. The Russians, for their part, were playing for it for years; the harassment campaign, the motor-rifle regiments parked up on the southern road. But however wrong they were, I’m saddened by it; they believed in the European dream, in joining Sweden and Venice, far more seriously than they did in America in any practical sense.

Russia has Ledeenised the situation – they picked up some crappy little country and threw it against the wall to show they meant business. Vladimir Putin, who presumably spent the autumn of 1989 cursing in the mess at Yasenevo, turned up to take pseudo-charge in the field; the US advisors exited via the pool at the Sheraton. Isn’t it always the pool, at the Sheraton?

As with Ledeenisation 1.0, we didn’t really offer an alternative nor any resistance. Worryingly, a range of other ex-Soviet states lined up to offer their support to Russia; not that they needed Kazakh divisions, but it’s not hard to see which way this is going. Nicolas Sarkozy would have come off this the worst – he flew in, at last, the Western support, and recommended surrender on terms the Prussians of 1870 would have considered tough, but not before making profile with jet, grin, grip etc as the war went on. Worse, he doesn’t even seem to have checked that the terms were sufficiently humiliating before setting out. He didn’t even deliver that. Carlo Levi’s remark that nothing came from Rome but tax collectors and speeches on the radio comes to mind.

It’s a tale of ugliness and failure, all right. I said Sarkozy would have come off this the worst, but then….Bush administration bungling/stupidity/callousness is nothing surprising any more. But this is truly impressive. One of the good things about NATO, after all, is that it’s a lot harder for two member states to a) not tell the other the Russians are coming or b) not tell the other they’re coming for the Russians.

What now? Well, every wind turbine is a vote for independence. And perhaps Hezbollah should start offering military advisors; after all, they know a thing or three about dealing with an enemy on the other side of a hilly border with many tanks.

Georgia and NATO

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The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.

NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, but also from reassurance that they wouldn’t face any threats within Europe – one of the reasons NATO militaries spend so much time cooperating in multinational HQs is precisely this. NATO also provided, and provides, a degree of certainty that US, British, and French nuclear weapons are available to deter an attack on other Europeans. But, as Gaddis pointed out, the balance of power was so stable because as well as the prospect of a formidable conventional defence and a devastating nuclear counteroffensive, NATO also offered the Soviet Union confidence that nobody would do anything stupid. Reassurance was as important as deterrence, and its most important form was self-deterrence.

Self-deterrence? Yes. It was a provocative way of saying it, but what was meant was that everyone agreed to observe a policy of non-provocation towards the other side. The results of actually triggering the common deterrent were, after all, so awful that nobody would take the risk. The upshot, in Europe, was that the European club’s entry requirement is as follows: you must hand in your historical baggage to be searched. If they find any irredenta in there, you’ll have to get rid of them before you’re coming in.

So, surely, we all ought to be delighted Georgia didn’t get into NATO. Right? What the hell were they thinking?

There’s a problem here, though; if we assume that Georgia, and specifically Mikhail Saakashvili’s version of it, wasn’t sufficiently responsible (adult, civilised, possibly even white?) to play, how do we explain that Germany got to join in 1955, when a whole great chunk of it was in the other side’s hands? Or Turkey and Greece, who despite being profoundly NATO-integrated regularly use their NATO-standard air defence infrastructure to play cowboys and Indians over the Aegean? One of the reasons for extending membership of NATO, and the EU, has been to reach out first; that it’s better to offer membership, and hope the requirements shape some country’s thinking, than to wait forever for perfection. If this was good enough for Germany, surely it can be good enough for Georgia.

However, it’s a hell of a big risk, and you have to wonder what possible guarantees would have sealed the deal; only a peaceful solution of the frozen conflicts would have been enough to provide NATO with the necessary reassurance that Georgia wouldn’t get them into trouble, and that would have got rid of much of the point of NATO membership for Georgia and also have been politically unacceptable to Georgians. Sometimes there is no good solution, although you have to wonder whether some European power shouldn’t find Georgia a supply of portable anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles, which have the advantage of not being anywhere near as useful aggressively as Grad MLRS batteries.

Karadzic; a one-man fin de siecle

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It’s strange, really; looking back at Radovan Karadzic’s career, the thing that strikes me is how he seems to have recapped most of Europe’s 20th century in his own life, barking his shins on the bits that didn’t fit.

First of all, he wanted to be a romantic poet, itself a dated idea. According to Tim Garton Ash’s interviews with old student friends, he was obsessed by Viennese decadent poets of the 1890s and 1900s, especially Georg Trakl. That atmosphere of stifling conventions and strange new ideas, the motif of curling, growing plants as a symbol for sex and worshipped youth.

Then he thought he would be a psychiatrist. Well, what do you say – it’s not just Freud. Charcot fits in the same period, as does Emil Kraepelin, who founded most of the classical psychiatric diagnoses. Failing the empathy required of psychoanalysis and the rigour of medical psychiatry, what did he do?

Of course, he became a romantic authoritarian nationalist. Like Lanz von Liebenfels and so many others, he worshipped the race and the leader, who would come up like the lifegiving sun of the north when war swept away all that conventional clutter. In his case, the conventional clutter included an awovedly communist state that also practiced free trade and something you could describe as multiculturalism; a total package to provoke an Edwardian/Wilhelmine madman.

And as you might have expected, when he got his hands on the controls, he delivered something very like Europe in the great wars, before going down at the hands of the great world seapowers’ planes and tanks (well, more accurately their light infantry and guns – but people like Karadzic loved to imagine their enemies as degenerate weaklings).

The German Plot Against French!

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An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance to a distant Parisian king; the revolution changed all that, or more specifically, the 19th century did, with the army’s numbered, nationally-recruited regiments, the uniform school curriculum, the administrative structure of prefects and subprefects all answering to the same ministry in Paris.

So, the very idea of a minority speech is quite a difficult one for a state that is still very, very centralised. Just how difficult this is for some people can be measured by the response of Jean-Claude Monneret, a member of the Academy, no less:

… [T]outes les langues n’ont pas la même dignité. […] [O]n ne peut mettre sur le même plan ce qui est une grande langue de culture et un dialecte appauvri. Existe-t-il un Rousseau en occitan, un Tocqueville en basque, un Balzac en ch’ti …, un Stendhal en breton, un Montesquieu en catalan? (“All languages do not have the same worthiness. […] We can’t put on the same level a great language of culture and an impoverished dialect. Is there a Rousseau in Occitan, a Tocqueville in Basque, a Balzac in Ch’ti …, a Montesquiue in Catalan?”)

And you thought you couldn’t have colonialism in one country. Of course, Montesquieu and Rousseau lived before the Revolution, so didn’t do their army service or go to one of Jules Ferry’s schools by definition. And Rousseau was Swiss; so what kind of French did either of them actually speak, as opposed to writing? I don’t know; but this seems incredibly anti-scholarly, as if we just assumed Shakespeare spoke BBC English.

Cette question des langues régionales en Europe est aussi à penser dans le cadre d’une géopolitique bruxelloise d’inspiration germanique. Il y a aujourd’hui en Europe des groupes d’intérêt qui militent pour un reformatage de l’Europe sur un modèle politique impérial. La manoeuvre qui consiste à encourager la reconnaissance de toutes les langues minoritaires n’est qu’un leurre, une stratégie oblique qui vise en fait à déconstruire, à détricoter les nations européennes autres que l’Allemagne, qui toutes incorporent des groupes d’appartenance linguistiquement minoritaires.

Ainsi, subtilement, on ne s’attaque pas frontalement aux États, mais on commence par une reconnaissance linguistique. C’est très «démocratique», ça semble n’engager à rien. Mais à partir de là, c’est le toboggan.

(“This question of regional languages in Europe should also be considered in the context of a German-inspired geopolitical initiative in Brussels. Today in Europe there are interest groups who agitate for reforming Europe on an imperial political model. The manoeuvre of encouraging the recognition of all minority languages is just a decoy, an oblique strategy that in fact aims to deconstruct, to de-knit European nations other than Germany, who all include groups belonging to linguistic minorities.

Thus, subtly, one doesn’t attack the member states directly, but one begins with linguistic recognition. This is very “democratic”, it doesn’t seem to amount to anything. But after that, it’s a slippery slope.”)

Wow. That’s pretty damn crazy…but the interesting bit to me is the assumption that Germany is linguistically homeogenous and a centralised, unitary state. To believe that, you need to know absolutely nothing whatsoever about German, German history, or the current German state. It is not difficult to find bits of Germany where you might need to ask people to speak hochdeutsch; it’s happened to me. And Germany is the most federal state in Europe after Switzerland; even the Wilhelmine empire was so federal that each Land had its own army, even if this didn’t mean much in practice as only the Prussians had a general staff.

Particularism is still a major force in German (and EU) politics today; the minister-president of Baden-Wurttemberg practically ran his own foreign policy through the European Convention, as I recall. So what planet is this guy on?

Horrible European Surveillance Proposals

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What fuckery is this? It looks like the French government, having failed to impose an awful record-industry inspired snooping act at home, is trying to policy-launder it through the European Union. The so-called “3 strikes” law foresaw that ISPs would be required to cut off service to anyone who was found downloading or distributing copyrighted material three times – which of course implied that the ISPs would be expected to filter all traffic by content, a wildly grandiose, authoritarian, and insecure idea. (Wonderfully, Nicolas Sarkozy outsourced his Internet policy to a committee led by the owner of a chain of record shops; a little like putting the manufacturers of candles in charge of street lighting.)

But the legislation failed in France; so here it is, coming straight back via the European Parliament. The odd bit, though, seeing as it’s a French idea chiefly backed by the EPP (=European Conservative group), is that it’s being pushed by the British Tories in Brussels – half of whom don’t believe there even should be a European Parliament. Specifically, according to Heise.de (German link), it’s the Tory MEPs Malcolm Harbour and Sayed Kamal. Kamal is responsible for possibly the most egregious tagnut of a clause in the whole thing, which would permit essentially unrestricted telecoms surveillance for the (naturally undefined) “security of a public or private communications system”, and Harbour for the copyright/content-sniffing bit.

This raises some interesting questions. For a start, let’s get this out of the way: here are detailed instructions on who to phone and shout at. There are more at the bottom of the ORG post referenced above. You have until the 7th of July.

But since when has EU-sponsored mass telecoms snooping and censorship been the policy of the Conservative Party? Perhaps fortunately, they’ve been out of power since the Internet has been an issue, so this has never really been tested; David Cameron certainly didn’t say anything about this, the lying turdwit.

Privacy Chernobyl in Bonn

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That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will kibosh all those monster database schemes for the foreseeable future. The subtext is perhaps that whatever the damage may be, it’s the collateral damage we have to accept to stop the bastards overrunning us.

What if, however, the first people to catch it were pompous German executives? Some would fear this wouldn’t draw any moral reaction from the public – who cares what happens to the bastards? Others might think it’s precisely their outrage that would finish the buggers quickest. It seems, though, that the Privacy Chernobyl might already have happened, in Germany. Scandal has been raging around Deutsche Telekom for a while; the monster telco, one-third state-owned, has been caught spying on members of its supervisory board, and much worse, journalists and trade union reps. Der Spiegel burst the story, interviewing the boss of a Berlin information security firm that was given the raw data from DTAG’s systems to analyse. He’s singing like a canary. DTAG promised that it was all over by the time the current CEO took over, but it turned out that the security firm was receiving money years later, money that came from the same cost-centre as the CEO’s office.

But this is far from the worst that might have happened. It wasn’t so much the content of the calls that was being spied upon, but rather their metadata. This is something one learns quickly on joining the telecoms industry – it’s the signalling that matters. The SS7 signalling traffic on a mobile network contains a treasure of information on who telephones, with whom, and from which geographic locations. Matching the dumps of data, they would have been able to trace the movements of the targets, their social networks, and who they met with.

It gets worse. Last week, Der Spiegel revealed that Lufthansa had also trawled its frequent flyer files in order to find out who a particular hack was getting information from. The real killer was, though, the suggestion that the two companies’ security departments might have swapped data – it turns out there is a strong old boys’ network between the security organisations German industry set up during the extreme-left terrorism of the 1970s, and something like a black market in database tables. Lufthansa’s frequent flyer programme offers benefits on all kinds of other stuff, including railway tickets and their own virtual mobile phone operator (MVNO), and a credit card – there’s a lot there already, but the kicker is that most big German companies outsource their expenses management to the same Lufthansa division that runs the loyalty scheme. And the journos were run through the same analysis.

Quite possibly, an entire corporate elite’s movements, communications, and tastes may be compromised. Everyone involved is already in the deep shit, as the rights to privacy and to freedom of the press are guaranteed by the German constitution, to say nothing of the ordinary law. If the radioactive smoke isn’t already billowing over the countryside, the containment vessel is bulging and glowing.

But there’s an odd detail here – T-Mobile USA refused to participate in illegal surveillance operations, like Qwest and no other US telcos. I have always believed that the reason for this was that T-Mobile, alone among telcos, has on-network transatlantic roaming. Due to the fundamental principles of GSM, T-Mobile subscribers from Germany, Holland, the UK, or indeed any other T-Mobile network in Europe, would have been spied on in the US with the involvement of T-Mobile in their home country, because their Home Location Register (HLR) would have been queried for every network transaction that occurred in the US. (It’s the signalling, remember.) This would have obviously had very serious legal consequences back in Europe.

And then, a LIBRARY!

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The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though:

Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschmul, ein Wiener Jude, erinnert sich gut daran. Als er 1938, nachdem die deutschen Truppen in Wien einmarschiert waren, eines Morgens aus seinem Fenster hinunter auf den Währinger Gürtel sah, fuhren alle Autos plötzlich rechts, wie in Deutschland. Über Nacht war der gesamte Verkehr umgestellt worden, und niemand hatte ein Problem mit der neuen Ordnung. Da sei ihm klar geworden, dass er Wien verlassen musste. Mit seinen Eltern floh er aus Österreich.

They used to drive on the left? Who knew? And the image of everyone suddenly driving on the right, the morning after the Nazi seizure of power, is better than any novelist could have invented. I liked this, too:

Denn die Rotlichtszene, lange untrennbar mit dem Gürtel verbunden, verliert ihr Publikum, vor allem dort, wo der Gürtel so schick und quirlig geworden ist. Eine der Unterweltgrößen, in Wien “Strizzis” genannt, hat den Sittenverfall schon in einem Interview beklagt. Erst seien die Stadtbahnbögen ausgeräumt und Kulturzentren eingerichtet worden. Und dann hätten sie ihm auch noch “eine Bibliothek hingebaut”.

What did the porno boss find most offensive? The library, damn it.

While Europe Napped

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Perhaps not “While Europe Slept”, but can we have a little more attention to what’s going on in Italy? As well as the fascist saluting business, and the is-he-joking-is-he-serious threats of violence, we’re seeing gypsy camps being set on fire by thugs, whose behaviour is being excused by the Northern League on grounds that the government hasn’t gone far enough in kicking them out of the country. The government, for its part, is happily legislating against people on the grounds of citizenship, and has apparently decided to forget about the Treaty of Rome and the ECHR for a while.

What genuinely worries me, though, is this trope of people working-towards-the-leader, going too far, and being tacitly understood as having the right motives. It’s traditionally one of the most effective ways to get people to do something really awful. Similarly, this parallel-police tendency is very dangerous stuff – Misha Glenny reckons the goons are being supplied by the Camorra, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. Hey, and people thought I was crazy when I suggested Berlusconi might not go when he lost the last election…

Fortunately there’s the Spanish deputy prime minister and a Hungarian MEP;

Hungarian liberal MEP and a Roma herself Viktoria Mohacsi visited gypsy camps outside Rome and Naples. According to Italy’s AGI news agency, she said that she had been “frightened and filled with horror” by what she had seen.

She referred to “[the] random night roundups, assault in prisons, gratuitous arrests and a general persecutory climate unworthy of a country which considers itself democratic.”

but this isn’t enough. The European Commission is silent. Does anyone now remember that they applied official sanctions to Austria because of the FPO’s entry in government? Yes, they consisted of marginally reducing the size of the flag on the EC representative office on the Karntner Ring or something, but at least it made the point.

One, two, many Uneuropean Unions

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We’ve occasionally played with the idea of the EU as the Borg, a new kind of political entity whose chief means of power is membership in its system of technocratic cooperation. The paradigm of this is, of course, the successful absorption of the Mediterranean ex-dictatorships and the economic development of the poor periphery – not just the ex-communist states but also places like Ireland and Portugal. Here’s something interesting, if you really like that sort of thing – Kosmopolit blogs about the changing nature of the EU Neighbourhood Policy and the various other headings under which the EU’s foreign policy falls – the Black Sea Synergy (ouch), the Eastern Partnership, the Barcelona Process et al.

The crucial insight is that rather than the potential new members (or not, but we’ll come to that) being offered a list of things they must do with regard to the EU in order to get something from the EU, it’s now a question of their being asked to do EU-like things with regard to a third country, for example to set up institutional cooperation on specific problems or monitor each others’ democratic credentials. The really interesting bit is that this doesn’t have to apply to EU membership only – it could also mean a policy of encouraging the creation of alternative EU-like communities.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the EU, so often derided as a hypercentralised bureaucratic monster, was actually a prototype of a rhizomatic form of government?