Schneier: Security, technology, and why global warming isn't a real problem

In the Fever Days after September 2011, I wrote a bit about "the cost of havoc". The premise was that technology was consistently reducing the cost of havoc, but the cost of prevention was falling less quickly.

I still have my writing, but most of it is offline - esp. prior to 2004. As I said, those were the times of fever; back then we saw few alternatives to a surveillance society. Imagine that.

Ok, so that part did happen. On the other hand, we don't have Chinese home bioweapon labs yet. Other than ubiquitous surveillance, 2013 is more like 2004 than I'd expected.

The falling cost of offense/cost of defense ratio remains though. Today it's Schneier's turn to write about it… (emphases mine)

Schneier on Security: When Technology Overtakes Security

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force -- for both attackers and defenders….

.. The problem is that it's not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They're more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They're not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side -- it's easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can't do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don't think it can.

Because the damage attackers can cause becomes greater as technology becomes more powerful. Guns become more harmful, explosions become bigger, malware becomes more pernicious...and so on. A single attacker, or small group of attackers, can cause more destruction than ever before...

.. Traditional security largely works "after the fact"… When that isn't enough, we resort to "before-the-fact" security measures. These come in two basic varieties: general surveillance of people in an effort to stop them before they do damage, and specific interdictions in an effort to stop people from using those technologies to do damage.

… Lots of technologies are already restricted: entire classes of drugs, entire classes of munitions, explosive materials, biological agents. There are age restrictions on vehicles and training restrictions on complex systems like aircraft. We're already almost entirely living in a surveillance state, though we don't realize it or won't admit it to ourselves. This will only get worse as technology advances… today's Ph.D. theses are tomorrow's high-school science-fair projects.

Increasingly, broad prohibitions on technologies, constant ubiquitous surveillance, and Minority Report-like preemptive security will become the norm..

… sooner or later, the technology will exist for a hobbyist to explode a nuclear weapon, print a lethal virus from a bio-printer, or turn our electronic infrastructure into a vehicle for large-scale murder...

… If security won't work in the end, what is the solution?

Resilience -- building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks -- is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks. Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If the U.S. can survive the destruction of an entire city -- witness New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or even New York after Sandy -- we need to start acting like it, and planning for it. Still, it's hard to see how resilience buys us anything but additional time. Technology will continue to advance, and right now we don't know how to adapt any defenses -- including resilience -- fast enough.

We need a more flexible and rationally reactive approach to these problems and new regimes of trust for our information-interconnected world. We're going to have to figure this out if we want to survive, and I'm not sure how many decades we have left.

Here's shorter Schneier, which is an awful lot like what I wrote in 2001 (and many others wrote in classified reports):

• Stage 1: Universal surveillance, polite police state, restricted technologies. We've done this.
• Stage 2: Resilience -- grow accustomed to losing cities. We're  not (cough) quite there yet.
• Stage 3: Resilience fails, we go to plan C. (Caves?)

Or even shorter Schneier

• Don't worry about global warming.

Grim stuff, but I'll try for a bit of hope. Many of the people who put together nuclear weapons assumed we'd have had a history ending nuclear war by now. We've had several extremely close calls (not secret, but not widely known), but we're still around. I don't understand how we've made it this far, but maybe whatever got us from 1945 to 2013 will get us to 2081.

Another bright side -- we don't need to worry about sentient AIs. We're going to destroy ourselves anyway, so they probably won't do much worse.

Aurora - the rational response is better schizophrenia management

Robert Ebert:  "Here is a record of mass shootings in the United States since 2005. It is 62 pages long ... The hell with it. I'm tired of repeating the obvious."

Gail Collins: "Did you catch the one last week in Tuscaloosa? Seventeen people at a bar, hit by a gunman with an assault weapon."

Well said, but both Collins and Ebert know we're not going to get meaningful gun control in the United States any time in the next twenty years. We'll get a Carbon Tax long before we'll get weapon management.

American gun control died when the NRA pushed Bush to a statistical tie with Gore, and brought us the torture presidency.

In any case, it's not clear even strict gun control would be more successful than the American War on Drugs. There are vast numbers of inexpensive and effective weapons of mass murder in the US. The cost of havoc is low.

As a nation, we've gone a long way down a rough road.

That doesn't mean we can't do anything. It's almost certain that the latest killer is mentally ill, probably paranoid schizophrenic. As a nation, our care of the mentally ill is abysmal in blue and red states alike. Physicians have fled the specialty of psychiatry and we're dramatically short of the family physicians who might fill the gap.

If we're going to get anything of value from this soon-to-be forgotten nightmare, it won't be from some incremental and soon eroded change to Colorado's gun control laws. It will come from leveraging Obamney Care's new financing for mental illness. We need to make it much easier for friends, family, and teachers to get help for paranoid schizophrenics, and we need to provide support for treated schizophrenics to stay well.

Update 7/22/2012: A slightly different take from a Columbine book author:

The Unknown Why in the Aurora Killings - David Cullen - NYTimes.com

... Dylan Klebold was an extreme and rare case. A vast majority of depressives are a danger only to themselves. But it is equally true that of the tiny fraction of people who commit mass murder, most are not psychopaths like Eric Harris or deeply mentally ill like Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. Far more often, they are suicidal and deeply depressed. The Secret Service’s landmark study of school shooters in 2002 determined that 78 percent of those shooters had experienced suicidal thoughts or attempts before mass murder...

It's a bit odd to say that someone who is suicidal and has delusional symptoms of major depression is not "deeply mentally ill", but Cullen is not a physician.

I think what he's trying to say is that most shooters are mentally ill, but that psychotic or severe depression is more common than schizophrenia.

I haven't been able to find any public health literature, but it's important to note that many shooters don't survive to get to a full psychiatric evaluation. One of the best responses to the Aurora shooting would be to fund a review of psychiatric issues in shooters and identify intervention opportunities.

Ferret flu: An existential challenge to anti-Darwinist Republicans?

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought.

Yes, influenza can be weaponized by guiding Darwinian natural selection - but that takes years of patient work and advanced technologies. It's beyond the grasp of, say, Anonymous.

So this research is good news - for most of us.

Isn't it a problem for the anti-Darwinist wing of the GOP though? The group that opposes the teaching of natural selection? How do their Senators get their heads around this issue?

Perhaps man was not meant to fly after all

Most things do not end the way I once imagined. The buildings don’t collapse because the foundation is gone. They sag. They fade. For a long while nothing seems all that different. One day we realize they’re really gone.

I thought fax machines would be gone by 1990. This morning I explained to Emily how our never used Brother MFC fax function could be, in theory, receive a fax sent to our home number.

After the anthrax attack I though letters would go away; that PDF would replace both paper mail and, incidentally, fax. I still get letters.

I don’t get many letters though, and I don’t get many faxes. Postal stations are closing. Kinkos, where we used to send and receive faxes, is going away. Faxes, letters, pay phones, printers – they’re joining slide rules, typewriters and carbon paper.

In November of 2001 I thought the era of mass air travel would end. It seemed too expensive to secure planes given the psychology of fear and the limitations of human risk assessment. Havoc was simply too inexpensive, too easy. I thought the teleprescence market would take off. I didn’t expect Al Qaeda to spend 9 years being stupid. Alas, they seem to have gotten smarter lately.

Now, 9 years later, air travel is much more expensive and uncomfortable than it used to be. Now the poor sods doing TSA work are mocked and scorned. Now my employer rarely flies any worker bees anywhere. Now Apple markets FaceTime (though nobody actually uses it).

Popular aviation is looking rusty, and the Great-Recession-deferred 2011 $5/gallon gasoline I predicted in 2007 is still coming, albeit two years late. As gas prices rise, so will the price of aviation fuel.

Faxes may be gone by 2020. I think so will the air travel we once knew. The world is going to get much bigger.

See also:

Others

• 'Like a Full-Body Massage' Thinking About the TSA - James Fallows - National - The Atlantic
• 'Securo-crats' terrorizing travellers - Gwynne Dyer - Winnipeg Free Press
• The Safety Question, Pt.2 | Talking Points Memo
• Hi. I am now going to touch your junk - Morford
• Why Cavity Bombs Would Make the TSA Irrelevant - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic
• Where I draw the line - Roger Ebert's Journal

Mine

• Gordon's Notes- 2011- The year American life changes (7/18/2007 – I was off by two years)
• Gordon's Notes- Unintended consequences- DVRs & the death of broadcast tv, HDTV and massive hard: Perils of prognostication. In 2004 I thought DVRs would be disruptive, just as I once thought CDs would be disruptive. In both cases it all went to the net.
• Gordon's Notes- Pay phones join tape reels and broadcast TV (12/2007 – technology transition. Slide rules too.)

Obama and the underwear bomber

I’ve not written much about the underwear bomber, mostly because the inanity of the public discussion is so depressing.

Schneier, as usual, has the most rational coverage. He points out that even our inevitably imperfect security measures do increase the challenges of bomb preparation, and thus the probability that an attack will fail. So even though metal-free recto-vaginal or intra-abdominal bombs can bypass millimeter-wave scanners or backscatter x-ray these devices will still increase the cost of a successful attack. (Though there are probably more cost-effective measures to increase security.)

One lesson from this attack is that we need to make an understanding of positive predictive value a requirement for high school graduation. It’s also clear that the controversial ridiculous fashion for teaching Latin is a major distraction from a desperate need to teach logic.

Lessons aside, I think the response of the Obama administration is interesting to watch. They clearly know that there’s not much that could have been done to stop this attack, and they know that they have to placate our spine-free hysterical nation. More interestingly, it looks like they’re trying to use this to attack the incompetent intelligence network we’ve inherited – even though, in this case, even a very good network would have failed.

It’s the equivalent of jailing a mobster for tax evasion when you can’t get ‘em for murder and mayhem.

PS. I’m so glad our heroic savior is a leftie foreigner who makes “low budget films”. At least we’ve been spared the usual celebratory histrionics.

Update: On further reflection, inspired by a polite comment, I was a bit harsh on the teaching of Latin. I do think there are substantially better uses of educational resources, but "ridiculous" was unmerited.

Update b: Schneier has summarized his recommendations. Perfect, as usual.

American spine movement: Brooks signs up

Maybe it's the influence of Gail Collins, maybe it's disgust with the GOP's institutionalized hysteria, maybe it's just chance, but David Brooks wrote a largely sensible editorial today.

He's effectively joined the American Spine Development Association, a now bipartisan movement to bring a smidgen of the courage of past generations to our cowardly modernity.

Perfection is not an option. Planes will blow up. An America with a spine will lose fewer planes and spend less than eternity at war. Spineless America will elect Sarah Palin.

Spine is good.

The economics of modern military action

In the modern world, large scale human military operations are quite expensive (emphases mine) ...

Kristof - More Schools, Not Troops - NYTimes.com

... For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there ...

The 1 soldier/20 school ratio is a reflection of both the cost of the soldier and the low cost of Afghan construction. It does not include the cost of operating the schools but the point is well made. Our army of one is very expensive.

This is curious because other military actions are getting cheaper. The cost of destruction (aka "cost of havoc") has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries. Even very poor people can afford very effective weaponry, command and communications infrastructure, spy satellites, and even weapons of mass destruction (an interesting variant is the low cost of climate engineering blackmail).

The low cost of certain kinds of military action may dramatically increase the cost of occupation-class operations, particularly those where soldiers can make choices. Separately, soldiering is increasingly a high skills occupation -- and one that's very hard to outsource to a low wage nation. Non-outsourcable high skills occupations are increasingly costly.

Perhaps one of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan will be that no future nation will be able to afford the cost of occupation.

Interesting.

Birthers, Deathers and Truthers - the reason behind the madness

Birthers believe Barack Obama's birth certificate was faked. Deathers believe Obama's health care reform bill is Soylent Green in disguise. Truthers believe the 9/11 attack was an inside job, that mines detonated prior to airplane impact.

Millions believe these things. I've been astonished to find that even learned people fall for one or the other -- particularly people raised in cultures where the media makes our flacks look good.

Millions believe in these stories, but they can't for the life of them spin an evidence-based or even rationally empiric argument for their positions.

So should we mock the weak, or, with greater wisdom, accept that Reason is a hard road that few follow?

I would say neither.

I have had the opportunity to observe someone with a quite low IQ be right when I am wrong. True, he cannot usually explain his reasoning - perhaps because he cannot translate the workings of his mind into words. Nonetheless, he's right more often than chance would allow. Sometimes the weak are wrong, but sometimes there's a rightness they cannot express.

So instead of mocking them, I will try to articulate the unexpressed reasoning of the Birthers, Deathers and and Truthers.

The Birther claims are utterly implausible. Yet, how plausible is that the same America that reelected George Bush and Dick Cheney would elect a brilliant champion of Reason with a Black wife, Black children, a Black father and the middle name of Hussein?

Really. Think about it. America?! It's absolutely implausible.

The Birthers are delusional, but perhaps they are reacting to the sheer implausibility of Barack Obama. Myself I tend to suspect the benign intervention of extra-terrestrials.

The Deathers are likewise perversely wrong about the health care reform mission. They are not wrong to worry however. If Obama succeeds, as I think he will, the world of health care will be recast. Nobody knows what all the side-effects and unanticipated consequences will be. The Deathers' are right to be fearful, though they should fear the status quo more.

Lastly, the Truthers. To defend their irrational beliefs, consider my own story.

When the towers fell I was sure that we'd face a long struggle against a brilliant and implacable foe. I forecast mass casualties in America. The falling cost of havoc meant we'd soon face detonation of a truck born black market nuke in an American city. There were so many, many ways for smart people to wreak havoc on a modern industrial nation - a terrible struggle lay ahead.

Except, like a lot of other people, I was wrong. When poor, pitiful, Richard Reid tried to ignite his shoes I began to doubt, and the more we saw, the more al Qaeda seemed to be a conspiracy of the dullard -- especially compared to, say, Hamas.

So how could these medieval drudges have ever been so horribly, terribly successful? It defies Reason that such a convoluted plot should have worked. Nobody has a confident answer -- save the Truthers.

Birthers, Deathers, Truthers -- all of them wrong in what they say and write. Yet, despite the wrongness of their words, their feelings are easy to understand. We live in a profoundly strange and unpredictable world.

Green shoots on climate change

The infamous green shoots of economic recovery are dust now, but I feel twinges of optimism about climate change.

A few weeks ago I wrote …

Gordon's Notes: Human progress and global climate change – are we good enough?

We are not what we were 20,000 years ago. We are not the people of 2,000 years past.

Hell, we’re not even the people I was born to.

We’re better than we were.

We’re better at damned near everything. I don’t know the how or why, but we’re still around 50 years post-fusion weapons. We got rid of Freon. We don’t routinely torture children in public schools. We have the ADA. We don’t smoke on airplanes. We have Obama. Gay unions, by whatever name, are inevitable….

…I think that if the climate change riff on our smoldering Malthusian crisis had come along in 2060 that we’d be ok. Fifty more years of Singularity-free progress and we’d be ready to handle our CO2 problem.

Except it isn’t 2060, and we’re struggling big time. The US Congress has passed a bill that gets us about 5% of the distance, and the Senate is expected to suffocate it. To add injury to injury, those who argued against the bill were babbling gibberish…

Even then I came down on the side of mild optimism. Since then I’ve actually become more optimistic.

Why?

Well, first, there is that bill. Sure the Senate may kill it, but it was an admission. It’s like the first Surgeon General’s report pointing out that smoking wasn’t really a healthy habit. The bill doesn’t change much, but it changes everything.

The second came from Grame Wood’s Atlantic article on geo-engineering (aka terraforming or climate engineering). There are two advantages to the geo-engineering track. One is that it gives nature hating Republicans a face saving way to admit there’s a CO2 problem. Face saving because they can acknowledge the problem while still offending tree huggers and continuing to pave paradise. That’s progress – of a sort. More importantly, however, is that geo-engineering is a low cost weapon of mass destruction …

..The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Even if Richard Branson behaves, a single rogue nation could have the resources to change the climate. Most of Bangladesh’s population lives in low-elevation coastal zones that would wash away if sea levels rose. For a fraction of its GDP, Bangladesh could refreeze the ice caps using sulfur aerosols (though, in a typical trade-off, this might affect its monsoons). If refreezing them would save the lives of millions of Bangladeshis, who could blame their government for acting? Such a scenario is unlikely; most countries would hesitate to violate international law and become a pariah. But it illustrates the political and regulatory complications that large-scale climate-changing schemes would trigger…

So all those island states and African nations that will be destroyed by a 11 degree F rise in temperature have a card to play. They can nuke the sun, so to speak.

Call me a cynic, but I believe climate weapons will concentrate minds more effectively than a hundred pleas for common humanity.

The third green shoot come from a recent post by James Fallows …

semi-encouraging_climate-change

…The speakers were Thomas Lovejoy, a long-time biodiversity expert, and David Hayes, who has recently become the #2 official in the Department of Interior.

Lovejoy's presentation began with a reminder of all the bad things that are happening to wildlife, to biodiversity, to life in the ocean, etc as CO2 levels in the atmosphere go up, taking temperatures with them. But … he emphasized how huge a role the Earth's own natural processes and vegetations -- its forests, grasslands, wetlands, even deserts -- can play in absorbing much larger quantities of carbon from the atmosphere than they do now and thereby reducing the greenhouse effect…

… He tied this analysis to perhaps the most frequently-used chart in modern climate-change thinking -- one produced by McKinsey & Co and the McKinsey Global Institute comparing the relative costs of different measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) levels in the atmosphere.

On the chart, the below-the-line items, on the left side, are GHG-reduction measures that save more money than they cost. Most of these are sheer efficiency measures (insulating buildings, switching to more efficient lights). The above-the-line escalating figures on the right are the rising costs of other abatement measures. The most expensive of them are high-tech "carbon capture and sequestration" systems, plus protecting forests in heavily-populated Asian countries.

Lovejoy's point was that a lot of "re-greening" steps are near the middle of the chart, either actually saving money or costing very little compared with a variety of clean-energy technologies…

… then Hayes stepped up with what was news to me. This was the announcement that the Department of Interior … is now quite serious about applying a "Re-greening" approach to the 20 percent of the US landmass under its control.

Hayes gave more details than I will recount here. They boiled down to a sequence of: trying to measure and understand the carbon-absorption properties of the various lands under its control; seeing how they can be improved, including with market-based offsets; telling the story to the public of why protecting and expanding forests, grasslands, wetlands, etc has an important climate-change component; making forest-preservation an important part of international climate negotiations (rather than talking only about clean-energy sources); and a lot more. (Including changes in U.S. agriculture, which are of course outside Interior's direct control, so that instead of being, incredibly, a net emitter of greenhouse gases, it has a positive effect. This is related to the Food, Inc. discussion of industrial agriculture mentioned here.)

.. it was surprising enough to hear from a senior DOI official and seemed politically and psychologically shrewd, in letting people think that there was some reaction to dire greenhouse gas projections other than holding their hands over their ears and wishing the whole problem would go away.

So we’ve got three green shoots. We’re painfully, slowly, moving to admit we have a very big problem. We’ve realized that poor nations in the path of the climate juggernaut have a (potentially lethal) card to play. And, lastly, a Rational President means we have a Rational Department of the Interior thinking about how humanity can win this one.

Today I’ll be optimistic … about climate change.

Health care? I still don’t see Americans coming to terms with the real options.

200 cases of illicit nuclear material trafficking each year

The 200 cases are the ones that get caught (emphases mine) …

Mohamed ElBaradei warns of new nuclear age | World news | The Guardian

ElBaradei, the outgoing director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart …

…He predicted that the next wave of proliferation would involve "virtual nuclear weapons states", who can produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium and possess the knowhow to make warheads, but who stop just short of assembling a weapon. They would therefore remain technically compliant with the NPT while being within a couple of months of deploying and using a nuclear weapon.

"This is the phenomenon we see now and what people worry about in Iran. And this phenomenon goes much beyond Iran. Pretty soon … you will have nine weapons states and probably another 10 or 20 virtual weapons states." …

Two hundred reports. Twenty-five states that either have nuclear weapons or can produce them with a month’s work.

And that’s if all goes as expected.

Yep, the Cost of Havoc is still falling.

We’re entering the new nuclear age. There’s hope however. Something unexpected allowed us to survive the first nuclear age. Maybe it's still around.

What stands between us and GD II

If not for what we've learned, we'd now be reliving the Great Depression ...

It’s 1930 time - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

.... What Eichengreen-O’Rourke show, it seems to me, is that knowledge is the only thing standing between us and Great Depression 2.0. It’s only to the extent that we understand these things a bit better than our grandfathers — and that we act on that knowledge — that we have any real reason to think this time will be better...

Except it would much worse today. The world population in 1930 was 2 billion, now we're about 6.8 billion. Our resources are more depleted, we're more dependent on agricultural trade. The cost of Havoc, of weapons of mass destruction, is far lower than in 1930.

We're not smarter than the leadership of 1930. We have the advantage of their mistakes, and the fortune that the GOP is out of power.

Homebrew life forms - oh joy

Those playful primates are at it again ...

Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home - Yahoo! News

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online ... hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering...

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly...

Truly, a heartwarming tale of the creative impulse at work. It brings back fond memories of those days of "Homebrew computing", or, in my case, the Delta DOS User Group [1]. It's the sort of science experiment my daughter would particularly enjoy.

If history repeats itself, which it's somewhat prone to do, we'll see all manner of creativity. We may expect some "worms and viruses" of course -- girls will be girls after all.

That's no big problem. We'll just plug in the biological equivalent of, say, Norton antivirus. Hmm, come to think of it, Norton didn't work too well. Much better to switch operating systems; really, OS X has many advantages.

Oh, wait. We really don't know how to change our genetic operating systems.

This could be a problem ...

[1] Or was it the Delta DOS Users Group? Memory fails alas. Those were the BBS days, when we used Telnet at night to visit distant modems. Hmm. it appears I have just created just created what will be forever more be the preeminent "hit" on searches for the DDUG. RIP DDUG.

Mumbai attacks - maybe not so expert

As expected, Schneier's analysis of the Mumbai attacks, is much better than anything from the mainstream media, including the WSJ, NYT or The Economist.

Blogs rule. Again.

Schneier makes several important points (read the post), but this one I'll call out (note the current count of attackers is 10) ...

... The attacks were surprisingly ineffective. I can't find exact numbers, but it seems there were about 18 terrorists. The latest toll is 195 dead, 235 wounded. That's 11 dead, 13 wounded, per terrorist. As horrible as the reality is, that's much less than you might have thought if you imagined the movie in your head...

Ineffective in quotes, perhaps. Mumbai is both unfathomably large and quite small. A family I personally know has lost several friends and colleagues.

The key point, which is not reassuring, is these young men accomplished the kind of devastation one might expect from healthy, ruthless, men with some military training and no particular desire to live. I suspect a suicidal team of SAS soldiers would have done far worse.

The thesis that these were not spy movie super-warriors is reinforced by the cooperation of the single barely adult captive (it pays to take these people alive):

Mumbai terror attacks: Rice calls for 'total transparency' from Pakistan | World news | guardian.co.uk

... Azam Amir Kasav, a 21-year-old Pakistani national who speaks fluent English, told interrogators his team took orders from 'their command in Pakistan', the investigators, speaking anonymously, told Reuters. The training was organised by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group and involved former members of the Pakistani army, they added...

If the US, EU and India can use this attack to force Pakistan to move against its internal terror network then this nightmare might be used to reduce future harm.

If Pakistan cannot act, then we will all have a better idea of what we're up against.

Update: Two incidents in Montreal, Canada, the 1989 Ecole polytechnique shootings (14 dead, 14 wounded) and the 2006 Dawson college shooting (19 wounded, 1 dead) are illustrative. In both cases the killers were mentally ill, had no particular military expertise, and used non-military weapons. Both killers committed suicide fairly early in their assault.

The city is not large or hard to navigate, and even in 1989 the police were experienced and well trained. Even so, the toll was considerable.

The fact that 18 survived the Dawson shooting, even two who had terrible injuries, is astounding and is credited to luck (of a dubious sort - it would be better luck not to be shot), superb emergency responses, the youthful vigor of the victims, the courage of bystanders, police strategies developed after the 1989 shootings, and a very well placed shot by one officer.

So there are things that can be done, but there are some vulnerabilities every modern city shares - from Mumbai to Montreal.

Return of the WMDs - from Pakistan

There is, of course, these press leaks are related to the Obama transition.

The WMDs are back. Emphases and italics mine.

Panel Fears Use of Unconventional Weapon - NYTimes.com

An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that...

... “Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan,” the report states...

... The report is the result of a six-month study by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, which Congress created last spring in keeping with one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission...

.... Commission officials said that date is a judgment based on scores of interviews and classified briefings conducted by members of the panel — led by former Senators Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri — but does not represent a new formal assessment by the United States intelligence agencies...

... The commission urges the Obama administration to work to halt the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs, backing up any diplomatic initiatives with “the credible threat of direct action” — code for military action, a commission official said....

So what part of this do I personally find least persuasive? This sentence: "unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that."

Ok, so the idea that military action against North Korea, short of occupying it, would prevent a bioweapons attack is probably even stupider.

I don't see how even the smartest and most urgent action could prevent a bioweapons attack -- if someone with money and brains really wanted to try it.

I assume the reason that it appears not to have happened so far [1] is that no national tyrant, even Sadaam, has wanted to do it, and that al Qaeda appears to have alienated all their potential geeks.

Note to murderous religious fundamentalists yearning for the medieval -- you really aren't geek-friendly. Please stay that way.

So, yes, we should pay special attention to bioweapons. Bush made that harder by using smallpox fraud to sell his Iraq invasion -- at the cost of a number of American's maimed or killed by the unwarranted and now forgotten federal immunization program.

So, by all means, pay attention. The threat appears real. But don't imagine we can necessarily prevent this from happening -- especially by attacking North Korea.

The cost of havoc is low and falling.

[1] I say "appears" because if an attack fizzled there's no way we'd recognize it. People die of basically inexplicable causes all the time. It's not a daily event at a sizeable hospital, but a few times a year.

Leahy on anthrax: the FBI is wrong

Leahy is one of the smartest and most respected senators in the business.

Now I really don't believe the FBI.

Senator, Target of Anthrax Letter, Challenges F.B.I. Finding - NYTimes.com:

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the anthrax letters of 2001, said Wednesday that he did not believe the F.B.I.’s contention that an Army scientist conducted the attacks alone.

At a hearing of his committee, Mr. Leahy told the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, that even if the bureau was right about the involvement of the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July before ever being charged, he thought there were accomplices.

“If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people,” said Mr. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont...

The FBI's credibility is almost as bad as Bush/Cheney's.

If Obama wins, the agency needs to be rebuilt.

If not for the anthrax attacks, would the US have invaded Iraq?

The post-9/11 epoch looks worse and worse as time goes by. The torture, the incompetent invasion (great move - start by alienating Turkey), the worse-than-incompetent occupation, the lies, the falsified intelligence ... and now we're reminded that the FBI and the Bushies botched the anthrax investigation. The Bushies, in particular, were keen to use the attacks to build the case for invading Iraq. They were much less interested in finding out what the heck was going on.

Much was made in 2001 and 2002 of an alleged relationship between Iraq and the anthrax attack. It was used to build the political case for war.

That was one hell of a big story. Many deaths, survivors suffering immensely, and a war.

And it's all but forgotten today ...

Scientist Is Paid Millions by U.S. in Anthrax Suit - NYTimes.com

.... The settlement called new attention to the fact that nearly seven years after the toxic letters were mailed, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others, the case has not been solved...

.... An F.B.I. spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation “is one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement” and is currently being pursued by more than 20 agents of the F.B.I. and the Postal Inspection Service.

“Solving this case is a top priority for the F.B.I. and for the family members of the victims who were killed,” Mr. Pack said.

But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat whose district was the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the attacks, said he would press Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., for more answers about the status of the case.

“As today’s settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched from the very beginning,” Mr. Holt said. “The F.B.I. did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end."...

The NYT blew the anthrax coverage so many different ways I've lost count. That may explain why they've never returned to the mystery. Including the mystery of why this was never repeated.

Incidentally, the great Tylenol poisoning case of my youth was never solved either.

Sometimes the really bad guys win.

Wiretaps are legal now

It's good to note these things.

This Modern World - It’s Repentin’ Time in Heaven:

....here’s Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri this morning, explaining why Congress is making it legal for giant telecoms to wiretap us: "When the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do."

We need a new American tradition.

Every time a traditional protection of the citizen is removed, we should have a national moment of silence.

Is this the right thing to do? The Cost of Havoc will continue to fall for the foreseeable future. There is an argument for reducing the freedom of citizens in proportion to the cost of this freedom. (Torture? No.)

This is a grave choice though, and it should be made with great thought and much discussion. It should be accompanied by greater oversight of government, strengthening the adversarial roles of the three branches, and greater penalties for incompetent and malign leadership.

We're not having those discussions, so this vote is a grievous thing.

Please don't vote for McCain. He is more, much more, of the same. If you can't manage to vote for Obama, vote for a libertarian.

Two years to crack Khan's hard drive encryption and reveal more bad nuke news

Presumably the NSA was truly responsible for cracking Khan's hard drive. It wasn't easy ...

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design - NYTimes.com

...Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the information that helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its $100 million program over to American and I.A.E.A. officials, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little....

I noted related stories in 2004, including the last good Maureen Dowd column and Seymour Hersh's theory that Pakistan would give us bin Laden if we went easy on them for AF Khan.

Of course Pakistan didn't deliver bin Laden and now they're getting ready to release Khan from house arrest. So that deal is off I suppose.

It will all make for a fascinating book, assuming our peculiar luck streak continues.

For today though I'm most interested in how the encrypted data was hacked. I suspect that story won't be out for a long time ...

Detecting weapons grade uranium: give up

Twice in the past 7 years, ABC news has smuggled depleted uranium, with a radioactivity signature comparable to highly enriched uranium (HEU), into the US. Despite packaging and address data designed to ensure maximal screening, the mild radioactivity was not detected.

HEU, like depleted uranium, is just not all that radioactive.

ABC received technical support from two scientists, one of whom was transiently assigned to a Homeland Security watch list as punishment for embarrassing the Bush administration. Last month the two published an article on the detection of smuggled HEU ...

Detecting Nuclear Smuggling: Scientific American

• Existing radiation portal monitors, as well as new advanced spectroscopic portal machines, cannot reliably detect weapons-grade uranium hidden inside shipping containers. They also set off far too many false alarms.
• So-called active detectors might perform better, but they are several years off and are very expensive.
• The U.S. should spend more resources rounding up nuclear smugglers, securing highly enriched uranium that is now scattered overseas, and blending down this material to low-enriched uranium, which cannot be fashioned into a bomb.

In addition to the above synopsis, the author's point out that it's fairly trivial with modern HEU to create a nuclear weapon. (The online version of the article includes a plaintive editor's note claiming all the information in the article is available from public sources.)

The NYT wrote about the detector program last March. The detectors are great at producing false alarms, it turns out that we live in fairly radioactive world*. Problem is, the best research tells us they're really lousy at finding minimally shielded weapons grade uranium.

It's reasonable to invest in better detectors, but the current generation are security theater with a high cost in false alarms. We should be focusing our efforts on restricting leakage of HEU from Russia and other sources. We won't get that kind of intelligent response from Bush or McCain, so all we can hope is that someone else wins the presidency.

On the other hand, I remain puzzled that five years after many experts agreed it was inevitable, we haven't seen nuclear terrorism in the US. It's not the detectors, and most reports indicate we're not doing enough to slow the HEU trade, so what's up?
--
* Good thing that current medical research suggests we're more radiation resistant than we thought we were. Our DNA repair systems do relatively well with radiation.

Lester Brown, Julian Simon, the UNFPA, Malthus, and, again, the Food

I heard Lester Brown on NPR this morning.

That took me back 27 years. Bear with me, there's a reason to start then.

Once upon a time I was a covert intern at the UNFPA officers in what was then Bangkok.

In those days we thought of the "FP" in "UNFPA" as "family planning", though I think it stood for "Fund and Population". The UNFPA was all about changing fertility behaviors and accelerating the transition in family size from agrarian to industrial norms. Thailand, Taiwan, and Bangladesh were success stories. Rwanda was a worrisome failure. Afghanistan was on the map because of its ecological collapse.

In those days Lester Brown, the Worldwatch Institute, and Malthus were in the ascendancy. My UNFPA mentor and I leaned towards Malthus, and so I wrote essays for him attacking the optimistic economist Julian Simon, whose views were well summarized in his NYT obit:

... The essence of Mr. Simon's view of man and the future is contained in two predictions for the next century and any century thereafter that are in ''The State of Humanity,'' a book he edited for the Cato Institute.

''First,'' he wrote, ''humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.''

He argued that mankind would rise to any challenges and problems by devising new technologies to not only cope, but thrive. ''Whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster,'' he said in a profile published in Wired magazine last year.

Mr. Simon's views were widely contested by a large coterie of the academic and scientific community, many of whose members believe that more people create more problems, straining the earth and its resources in the process.

''Most biologists and ecologists look at population growth in terms of the carrying capacity of natural systems,'' said Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. ''Julian was not handicapped by being either. As an economist, he could see population growth in a much more optimistic light.''...

It's generally assumed now that Simon was right, but a pessimist would say it's too soon to tell. As DeLong and Krugman have pointed out, most of the human race was in a Malthusian trap from 6000 BCE until the time of Malthus himself. Rwanda, as feared in 1982, did experience a classic Malthusian collapse, though its subsequent recovery is much faster than the pre-industrial record. Afghanistan's fragile ecology collapsed in the 20th century, and we know how that story turned out.

Many things have happened since those days in Bangkok. Outside of Africa most of the world, especially China and India, followed the predictions of Simon rather than Malthus. On the other hand, world population growth has also followed the more optimistic projections of the 1982 UNFPA.

Given my historic roots, it's not surprising then that I would call the Simon vs. Brown battle a draw. On the one hand the Green Revolution worked, cheap energy meant cheap food, and worldwide trade combined with the kind of worldwide productivity growth Simon expected. On the other hand there were also near optimal changes in fertility behavior across many nations. The net effect was that a year or two ago we though that obesity might become a bigger public health problem problem than malnutrition in many once poor nations.

During this time the UNFPA, like all great bureaucracies, evolved to fill new niches. Now it's the "United Nations Population Fund - UNFPA" and all the links on the public page are about reproductive health and fighting HIV. The words "family planning" do appear, though they are a bit hidden.

Twenty-six years later, though, the wheel may have turned again. Simon died young at 65, but Lester Brown is still alive, and again on NPR. The reason, of course, is that classic collapse factors are again in play ...

Grains Gone Wild - Paul Krugman - New York Times

... Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months...

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

... First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains...

Second, there’s the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive...

Third, there has been a run of bad weather in key growing areas. In particular, Australia, normally the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic drought....

... Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels...

We need to dial way back on the biofuels experiment -- it's not working. Unless we figure out how to process cellulose it's an energy negative process. It should be a research project, not a production enterprise. Biofuel production happened prematurely because of US domestic politics (including, most shamefully, the actions of Minnesota's senators including the sainted Paul Wellstone).

The other problems are far less tractable, they'll persist even if we eliminate biofuels and lessen the direct competition between our mobility desires and food production.

So the EU, US, China and India could be simultaneously enlightened and decide to eat less meat, drive less, institute a carbon tax to fund research into alternative energy sources, and forswear biofuels. Or we could discover a something like "cold fusion", except it would have to work. Or we could ...

I'm out of ideas right now. Any suggestions?

It is worth remembering, in case anyone needs motivation for new ideas, that any local Malthusian collapse is likely to lead to the vengeful use of inexpensive weapons of mass havoc.

So we all have "skin in the game" -- beyond mere compassion.