Vital Systems Security

The engineering society IEEE’s general magazine Spectrum has a featurette on “Open Source Warfare” in the November online version. It’s written by Robert Charette, who normally tracks software failures at his blog Risk Factor. The article is a good one, as these things go, spurred on by John Robb’s recent book Brave New War. Robb is a RAND researcher who has been writing about so-called open source warfare for a few years now. I thought I’d post this here because it’s obviously of concern to me that the term open source is being applied in this way. What it means to the RAND researchers and people who think the concept makes sense, is captured by my title here though: jihadists and insurgents are said to be more efficient at innovating their techniques because they are “free from the administrative burdens of maintaining their own infrastructure…” and can rely on Wal Mart and Fedex to supply and ship the things they need to make household bombs.

So, my analysis of open source is useful here, in that I think they are absolutely right about this, but that it is only one piece of what makes open source distinctive… but lacks many others. There is no mention of the intellectual property related aspects, or the specific mode of openness that characterizes software projects, much less the specifc IT tools people use. But it is correct about one thing, which is the reliance on existing standardized infrastructures and hardware, such as the widely shared PC architecture, file formats (for insurgents’ videos), the Internet, secure international credit transactions for online purchasing and so on.

The phrase “administrative burdens” is a peculiar one though. Much or the article focuses on the weapons acquisition process of the US Military, arguing that the process simply takes a long time. The implicit argument seems to be that this process and the time it takes to acquire weapons should be changed and shortened. I wonder though, whether this is just another way of arguing that the military should have less oversight, more secrecy, and less accountability… which would be pretty much the opposite of what open source can and has achieved in other areas.

No time like this very second to point all you anthropology people (once again) to the debate about the role of your discipline in enlightening soldiers to the nuances and minutiae of cultures and cultural difference. As the debate about the army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) gets uglier, I thought this would be an appropriate time to link us to some the antagonists. In one obscure corner you will find the work of one Ann Marlowe, writer of - not kidding - such works as “The Book of Trouble: A Romance” and “How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z”, who has just published a scathing review of said HTS in the amusing slash scary Weekly Standard. (Dynamic link, so check it out fast!) In the Red, White and Blue corner, you will find the writing of a Mr. Dave Dilegge, editor of the curious and fascinating Small War Journal, who takes umbrage with Ms. Marlowe and hurls compelling counterpoints and blog daggers at her. And in the hipster corner, you will find the latest (rather blasé) blurb on the whole mess in the Danger Room. You will also find there links to Wired’s continuing coverage of this increasingly heated discussion. So glad my discipline of sociology is untouched by internal strife or critique of its methods and social utility.

CHICAGO, May 8 — For months, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and other governors have warned that their state National Guards are ill-prepared for the next local disaster, be it a tornado a flash flood or a terrorist’s threat, because of large deployments of their soldiers and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, last Friday night, a deadly tornado all but cleared the small town of Greensburg off the Kansas map. With 80 square blocks of the small farming town destroyed, Ms. Sebelius said her fears had come true: The emergency response was too slow, she said, and there was only one reason.

“As you travel around Greensburg, you’ll see that city and county trucks have been destroyed,” Ms. Sebelius, a Democrat, said Monday. “The National Guard is one of our first responders. They don’t have the equipment they need to come in, and it just makes it that much slower.”
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“World Without Oil” is an alternative reality game–not a video game or a “world” but more like a cross between a writing contest and a role-playing game. It asks participants to imagine what an oil shock would look like, and what living without oil will do to their lives, in real time, as the “oil shock” scenario unfolds. Thus it shares something with the scenario stylings of our vital systems friends, but one that is going directly to the people–albeit probably to preteens, hipster bloggers and youtube users first. What makes it so interesting is that it is actually very technically thin: just a web site where you submit links to content you create on your website, blog, video or by telephone. The site “masters” grade the content and choose the winners–presumably with the aim ofcollecting  a set of scenarios that might otherwise be difficult to generate. I’m skeptical that this particular game will get interesting, but the real issue is that it is pure genius.  I’m sure there will be others…

DHS, please take note.

From the website of the Centers for Disease Control: “The theme of the 12th Annual National Public Health Week is “Preparedness and Public Health Threats.” CDC, the American Public Health Association (APHA), and hundreds of partner organizations will encourage Americans to prepare effectively for public health threats, from bioterrorism and natural disasters to disease outbreaks.”

One of the events perhaps worth ‘attending’ is a satellite broadcast and webcast on pandemic influenza planning designed for “state and local preparedness partners, emergency responses specialists, public information officers, hospital and community-based health organization planners, and any other public health professionals interested in pandemic influenza planning and exercising.”

Chronical of Higher Education, Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Anthropologists Discuss Where to Draw Ethical Lines in Dealing With National-Security Agencies

By DAVID GLENN

American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for “cultural knowledge” about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively.

At a panel discussion that was Webcast from Brown University on Monday afternoon, Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times thinks so, in this editorial.
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The army has released General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual, including instructions on civilian-military integration (see sections on “Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan” and “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support in Vietnam”). Note also the definition of culture as a “web of meaning” (Section 3.36), the “muscle on the bones” of social structure.

At two recent press conferences, Chertoff explained the DHS risk management approach and talked about how critical infrastructure protection works. A snippet:
“So based on analysis that we have done through our infrastructure protection programs, we’ve identified a list of approximately a little over 2,000 individual national assets that have national or regional significance. These are truly the critical infrastructure across the entire country, and they reflect the kinds of things that you would imagine, in terms of power plants or dams that are located in an area in which an attack could have a regional or even a national impact. This does not include popcorn factories or hotdog stands or any of the stuff which came in for ridicule over the last year. It is a focused effort to put weight on those elements of infrastructure that represent something more than just the impact on population, but a regional or even a national impact.”

In Austin and New York, respectively. Friend of ARC Simon Bertrang reports from New York that the “paranoid” version is that this was a test. Stay tuned for assessments of how these events show that we are not prepared. In any case, an interesting exercise for environmental detection and for identification of pathogens. Interesting difficulties in both cases in figuring out the source of the problem.

Read on for the full New York Times story on New York…

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