I lost a job and am in the process of making some new and exciting life choices so updates are going to be even less regular. For instance I think I missed the October link roundup. Fight me.
September 2017: Link or Swim
Your scary survey for this month shows that Americans haven’t got any goddamn idea what’s in their own constitution.
“Disgust can still be a matter of life and death but it doesn’t seem to be working for us any more.”
By now this is ancient history but Mattis’s viral address to a small group of soldiers somewhere in MENA was disturbing. It doesn’t do to have the military thinking of itself as the last bastion of civic virtues against a citizenry that’s lost its national mind.
A short history of FOIA terrorism.
Marcy Wheeler’s got some theories about the Hutchins indictment.
Damon Linker expects a major offensive on the Culture War’s college campus front. Unfortunately I think he’s probably right.
The democratization of intelligence capabilities formerly reserved for state-level actors and the impending destruction of old categories of conflict is my perpetual hobby horse and here’s a good account from Vice of where we stand at the moment.
Rafia Zakaria in the Baffler on the jihadi personal essay.
From January, grassroots social media disinformation in South Sudan takes advantage of an information-poor environment to incite ethnic hatred. It’s not clear how lessons learned in Sudan can be extrapolated to more sophisticated contexts.
Maciej Cegłowski tells a stupid tale of a stupid person at Channel 4, who noticed that Amazon suggests sulfur and charcoal if you buy saltpeter and inferred from this that mad bombers are buying mad bombing supplies in numbers sufficient to influence the algorithm, and extrapolates this into a broader stupid tale about journalism and incentives.
We all heard about the Cajun Navy, but behind them was an army of dispatchers on cell phones and laptops all over the country.
“… across much of the Catholic world, young traditionalists are competing against old progressives.” I’m not Catholic so I have little to say about the particularly Catholic features of this phenomenon, but it seems to fit into the larger trend of traditionalist movements driven by milennials.
The OPSEC Fail of the Month Award is shared by Daesh and Experian. And to think people want terrorist content removed from the internet.
Donors trying to steer the output of think tanks is nothing new but Google’s attack on New America is uniquely sinister when taken together with their stranglehold on information access.
Conor Friedersdorf wrote the only good thing about the kneeling football players.
Hvat’s troll nema þat?
There have been two interesting developments in the world of organized political trolls today:
- The Daily Beast discovered that Russian Facebook ops did manage to incite some real-world organizing after all, but I’m linking you to Bellingcat’s writeup instead.
- It has generally been expected that Kremlin-backed trolls would go after Merkel, but instead most of the German- and English-language material is being generated by the American alt-right, and the Russians are nowhere to be found.
A few things stand out. First, the lines between state-run campaigns, astroturf, and citizen propagandizing were never clear to begin with, but soon it’s going to be impossible to draw them at all. Pretending to be Americans themselves, the Facebook Russians egg on actual right-wing American activists to organize rallies (this is so bananas I almost can’t get my head around it). Private American citizens organize anonymously online to carry out a propaganda campaign directed towards the German electorate against a German presidential candidate. Neither of these fit into our existing paradigms of an influence op, but neither are they citizen organizing in any sense we’re accustomed to.
Second, it’s a mistake to get hung up on numbers to the exclusion of all else when considering a decentralized political movement like the alt-right. Numbers matter for forming voting blocs, but not for the other corrosive effects they can have on public discourse and civil society. I’m not sure what to do about that, but yelling about how it’s only like two hundred dudes is no more helpful here than in the case of the jihadis.
Lastly, plenty of people have since 9/11 noted the rise of the non-state actor in the context of transnational Islamist terror groups like AQ and Daesh, but we have probably ascribed too much weight to the jihadis as jihadis: it will likely turn out that they were merely the first of the truly powerful non-state actors. I’ll leave aside the absurdity of a transnational alliance of ethnonationalists for another post, but at least jihadi tactics are in harmony with their universalist ideology. Anyway, technology has brought certain activities that were once the exclusive domain of the state within reach for the well-organized civilian: large-scale disinformation campaigns, geospatial intelligence, weaponized drones, etc. It remains to be seen whether the centralization of data by the tech giants will have any mitigating effect on the decentralization of capabilities.
Regarding Kaspersky
Why do threat modeling when you can split into warring factions, after all?
I cannot for the life of me understand why this debate is getting so fraught, because it’s really quite straightforward. This has next to nothing to do with the personal character of Yevgeny Kaspersky. I don’t know him and I don’t feel myself qualified to comment on him, although for what it’s worth he did attend the KGB’s technical college. It has everything to do with:
- your supply chain
- the personal character of Vladimir Putin
- the character of Vladimir Putin’s alleged government
Being nervous about Kaspersky doesn’t require that you think Yevgeny is a devious KGB assigned to infiltrate the networks of Russia’s adversaries by cunningly producing a high-quality security product. That’s goofy. Most likely Yevgeny is exactly what he says he is, and none of that matters, because Putin is a mafia thug. Kaspersky lives in Russia, his family lives in Russia, the families of most of his employees live in Russia, and the supply chain originates in Russia, all within reach of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s mafia thuggery.
There’s a lot of RUMINT out there regarding intel collaboration with the FSB and backdoors etc, but the truth-value of the RUMINT is beside the point. Even if, as is likely, Kaspersky products are not backdoored now, there is reason to fear that in the future the Russian government may choose to compel cooperation, either through financial or physical intimidation.
Now that real-time updates are the bread-and-butter of security products, I’m curious to know how the anti-anti-Kaspersky crowd plans on defending against some future backdoor. This is not a hypothetical: you may remember Russian intelligence owned MEDoc’s update servers and used it to push out a little exfil-and-wipe program called Nyetya to anyone who pays taxes online in Ukraine. It was pointed out on last week’s Risky Business that aside from the security products, Kaspersky has been developing a secure operating system for various kinds of critical infrastructure, which presents an even bigger threat than Nyetya-esque attacks. In a world in which CRASHOVERRIDE already exists, I’m not sure I want to make infrastructure attacks easier for any state-level actor.
So no, it is not “Russophobia” to suggest that perhaps it’s not the wisest idea to run Kaspersky products on natsec and other critical infrastructure. Don’t be horrible: people like me who are worried about Kaspersky products are worried about a situation in which threat of violence is used to force Yevgeny to play ball. Shut the fuck up and do your threat modeling.
August 2017: The Puns of August
So it’s not a URL joke. Sue me, if you can find me.
Scary Survey Of The Month: strong self-identification as ‘white’ was the largest predictor of support for the Donald.
John Sipher at Just Security on the strange interactions between criminal and CI investigations and the uncertain end of the Russia probe.
That bananas story about Sputnik DC was bananas and worthwhile, but I just don’t buy the line that Feinberg went in there all unsuspecting.
Imagine what Fox and the Daily Caller would have to say if, for instance, Al Jazeera English posted videos like this.
The Opsec Fail of the Month Award goes to the White House, and it’s a doozy.
The Seth Rich Story Story has a Kremlin angle because of course it has a Kremlin angle. Πως γαρ ου, Σωκρατες?
David Frum (this continues to feel very weird) on the threat paramilitaries and open carry pose to civil society, even when nobody is actually shooting anybody else. Even Virginia has plenty of laws that could be used to hammer these thugs, if anyone felt inclined to try to arrest them.
Why are so many fascists former libertarians?
On the folly of identifying with large unselective groups. Argue amongst yourselves, class.
The ongoing politicization of nearly everything.
Nathan Heller on Zeynep Tufekci’s research into decentralized protest. Internet-era direct action may suffer from absence of leaders for authority to negotiate with and from a lack of the quasi-institutional structure seen in the Civil Rights movement (with a sidenote on my biggest peeve: the ongoing efforts of Marxists to apply 19th century industrial paradigms to a totally different world).
… und verspürt ihr auch in euerm Bauch
den Hitler-Dolch, tief, bis zum Heft –:
Küßt die Faschisten, küßt die Faschisten,
küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft –!
Politics is not like the nursery.
Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions “that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal” (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain “races” from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated. And if it is true that “justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done,” then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address their defendant in something like the following terms:
“You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don’t understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of `collective guilt,’ according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them – things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.
“Luckily, we don’t have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963
July 2017: Linkoln Memorial
I think I’m going to start opening all my link roundups with yet another scary survey.
Maybe this is what all the bots will eventually be for.
Rondon of Caracas Chronicles in Politico from April, on the narrative coherence of post-truth politics vs. the messiness of reality.
On the Twitter mob and the poverty of left-wing discourse.
Long before Junior’s emails upended all our theories, Julian Sanchez suggested that collusion may be the wrong question. His central question— why in hell would the Russians tell the campaign?— is even more interesting now.
History tells us that we should head for the bunkers when the White House gets obsessed with Thucydides. Everything can be found in The History of the Peloponnesian War, and that’s exactly the problem (Pericles’ funeral oration isn’t about democracy, though: it’s about Athenian exceptionalism).
A technologist explains his choice to leave government service.
In Kazakhstan, a switch from Cyrillic to Latin script is a lot of hassle and expense to no obvious purpose.
In honor of Independence Day, David Frum plays Variations On “American Exceptionalism.”
I’m on one of my occasional Raymond Chandler binges right now, and while I was out running the other day I was thinking about how the discontinuous narratives in noir fiction match real life much better than the elaborate constructs one gets in the more traditional mystery novel. I was going to write something, but I found this essay on Farewell My Lovely at the LARB instead.
From all the way back in 2003, Slate’s compilation of the ‘poetry’ of Donald Rumsfeld is… well, anyway, read it.
Your captcha is part of a coming epistemological crisis. Magritte ain’t seen nothing.
Through requirements that social media companies to combat extremism on their platforms, governments are slowly but surely forcing the privatization of online counterterrorism. The new arbiters of extremism are the low-paid, undertrained, and mostly unaccountable contractors on the moderation staff. What could possibly go wrong?
Foa and Mounk rebut the haters.
The Opsec Fail of the Month Award goes to [drumroll] Leonid Brezhnev.
Auribus teneo lumpum.
DISCLAIMER: All predictions should be viewed through the lens of how wrong I was when that I said there would never be a special prosecutor.
Since Douthat’s now-infamous Amendment XXV op-ed brought the constitutional shenanigans out of the depths of the Blawgs into the mainstream discourse, I’ve found myself asking yet again what we the opposition are expecting to accomplish. Not-Trump is, in the abstract, a worthy goal, especially with no one worse looming on the horizon yet. In practice, achieving not-Trump by not-electoral means is likely to bring with it a host of other, more interesting problems. As a connoisseur I find these fascinating, but as a citizen I’m not so enthusiastic. There are three constitutionally legitimate ways of achieving not-Trump before 2020: resignation, impeachment, or Amendment XXV. Resignation is boring and I’ll eat my hat if it happens. The other two options have a common obstacle: neither of them would have any popular legitimacy.
The advantage of impeachment is that it’s hard to call it undemocratic: it’s right there in the constitution and only elected officials are involved. However, the absence of consensus makes it unlikely that Congress will risk the process in the first place. Impeachment has to follow public opinion. Most likely we will only see action from Congress if a critical mass of Republican voters are demanding Trump gets the hook, otherwise it’ll just be Clinton Redux. Then, I’m not persuaded by the argument that Amendment XXVing him is inherently undemocratic: it’s initiated by the cabinet, but it still requires the consent of 2/3rds of Congress if you’re going to make it stick. It doesn’t seem to be within the original intent of the amendment, which was to provide a mechanism for replacing the president if he was incapacitated but not killed in an assassination attempt, but creatively literalist legal interpretation is a noble American tradition. Of course, that doesn’t matter: when the average member of the People can’t name their own senator, we shouldn’t expect them to grasp, let alone get behind, this sort of casuistic constitutional contortion.
The practical objection to Amendment XXVing him out is that the now-infamous groveling meeting where everyone except Mattis pledged their eternal love for Our Glorious Leader suggests that the cabinet would not be interested in doing any such thing. The speculative objection to Amendment XXVing him is that, if successful, it does nothing to solve any crisis of legitimacy— it makes it far worse. Theoretically it puts him where he can’t trash institutions or start a war on Twitter, but as soon as the process is started, we’ve got ourselves a Type II constitutional crisis. It begins with the most spectacular Twitter hissy fit ever seen in this mortal vale of tears and probably the firing of the entire cabinet. Next comes exhausting quarrels over the meaning of “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” both on the floor of Congress and in the public discourse. No consensus will ever be reached. We’re stuck with a Mexican standoff in DC. The conflict totally consumes Congress. Trump and Pence are both insisting on their authority, and the rest of the executive is trying to function with even less leadership than usual, since there’s neither the time nor the inclination to confirm replacements. SCOTUS is trying to referee a situation that has no precedent except perhaps the Western Schism. At least half, and likely more, of the People won’t be having it. The National Mall could fill with dueling protest camps. After that it’s probably not safe to make predictions.
In a piece called “The Guardrails Cannot Contain Trump”, Krauthammer vagueblogs at Douthat and despite the title goes on about how when guardrails are failing we must strengthen the guardrails. Krauthammer and all the other Very Serious People are correct insofar when you’re trying to keep a constitution together, tricks tend to be an own-goal, but we cannot say in advance that Trump will be worse than some kind of strange state of exception any more than we can say that such a state of exception will be worse than Trump. The problem is that the Very Serious People don’t offer any serious suggestions on how we’re supposed to shore up the norms and institutions. Our legislative deadlock is not new, and it’s not improving. “Congress should redouble oversight” is just screaming into the void: the failure of the system is largely due to the longstanding unwillingness of Congress to properly perform its oversight role, or to exercise a number of other powers it constitutionally possesses over the executive. The bureaucracy will fall: when the principled resign in protest, their positions get filled by weasels or go unfilled altogether. Douthat’s idea is crazy, but at least he’s aware that we’ve run out of good choices.
When I started this post, I was convinced that neither impeachment nor Amendment XXV would happen. After tonight’s Russia-Thing-related stories, I’m not so sure. We’re out of good choices, but we have to choose anyway.
The Palestine Principles
I used to live in Jerusalem, for my sins, and when we finally got out of there, my friends and I set to work finding the general cases for the lessons we’d learned about surviving as politically questionable expats in an occupied city. If you’re a middle-class young person from a G8 country, living at the mercy of what is often referred to merely as the Situation or somewhat more theologically as the Inshallah Factor has a bit of a learning curve to it. While we were on the spot, the Moscow Rules had been bandied about a lot, so we tried to get our list down to ten, for symmetry. Our rules were these:
- Everything is political, including this rule.
- The true partisan can rationalize anything.
- Assume nothing.
- Keep a low profile.
- It never goes smooth.
- Never go against your gut.
- Have an exit strategy.
- Technology is your enemy.
- Don’t try to disrupt known surveillance.
- Whatever you did, you’ll hear about it at the border.
When we wrote them, we meant these for the unaffiliated foreign bystander in places like the West Bank or Ukraine, but someone had proposed a general theory that once 1 and 2 held good in a society, it was only a matter of time before the rest would start to apply as well. It’s starting to look like we’re going to find out.
June 2017: The Library of Alinksandria
Yet another troubling survey, this time on Americans’ views on the proper role of the media.
Tor Ekeland on oversentencing of hackers.
In our latest installment of Don’t Piss Off The Nerds, the Turkish thugs who attacked protesters outside the DC embassy got the shit OSINTed out of them.
In hindsight suppressing that 2009 DHS report on violent rightist extremism was probably not the greatest idea.
Shadi Hamid on how Egypt could have gone differently and how to get democracy to stick more broadly. He doesn’t address whether or not democracy can survive absent liberalism, and in the last paragraph there’s a very interesting potential rabbit hole about the consent of the governed.
Much of the discussion surrounding the not-actually-very-illuminating leak on compromised voter systems revolves around whether or not the KGB achieved lateral motion and was able to compromise provisioning infrastructure. Even if they didn’t, they succeeded, because we’re worrying about it.
There’s an unlikely alliance between anarchists in Exarchia and the Donbass separatists. Idiot leftists continue to confuse Putin’s territorial revanchism for anti-imperialism, just because the US isn’t a fan of it. Don’t be that guy.
Go listen to a very old Greek Marian hymn (but stay out of the comments if you value your sanity).
Jack Goldsmith’s piece from February on il Douche’s tweets and the immigration EO bears re-reading now that the case is inching closer to SCOTUS. In practice I think his predictions will hold, but I don’t believe it’s been thought through beforehand like he speculates.
A case study in watchman-watching: wardriving for IMSI catchers.
Bret Stephens should have written this last summer.
A growing number of Android apps have a charming habit of listening for ultrasonic beacons in sound produced by other devices. Identifying the Big Brotherish potential in this kind of thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
This story in the New York Times about a Russian assassin in Kiev posing as a journalist is pretty wild. I’m inclined to wonder what his exit strategy was going to be.
The Doubleswitch phishing attack has been used extensively against journalists and activists in Venezuela and elsewhere, both to cut off comms and to run info ops against the opposition off already-trusted accounts. It’s probably coming here sooner or later. Keep an eye on that story about all those DoD-linked Twitter accounts that got owned by bears.
Krauthammer on Article V. Not all deterrence is MAD.
The Opsec Fail of the Month award goes to everyone involved in the Reality Winner leak. This fills the blogger with acute second-hand embarrassment. Honorable mention to Mike Flynn.
Weasels Closing In 