Unsolved murders: 1982 Tylenol and 2001 Anthrax

The Tylenol murders of 1982 involved tampering with containers in the Chicago area.

... As the tampered bottles came from different factories, and the seven deaths had all occurred in the Chicago area, the possibility of sabotage during production was ruled out. Instead, the culprit was believed to have entered various supermarkets and drug stores over a period of weeks, pilfered packages of Tylenol from the shelves, adulterated their contents with solid cyanide compound at another location, and then replaced the bottles. In addition to the five bottles which led to the victims' deaths, three other tampered bottles were discovered....

There was no known communication from the murderer, so it didn't qualify as a terrorist attack. The killer was never caught, he (or she) might be alive today.

In 2001, seven days after the 9/11 attacks, another murderer sent anthrax contaminated letters from a mailbox in Princeton New Jersey. Again, wikipedia is the place to go for an update (something traditional media can't do):

2001 anthrax attacks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others...

...As of 2007, the anthrax investigation seems to have gone cold.[25][26] Authorities have traveled to six different continents, interviewed more than 9,100 people, conducted 67 searches and have issued over 6,000 subpoenas. The number of FBI agents assigned to the case is 17. The number of postal inspectors investigating the case is ten.[27] There are no reports that the investigators have identified the lab used to make the anthrax powders.

The failed Tylenol investigation is a discouraging precedent for the anthrax investigators.

We've mostly forgotten the anthrax attacks, and we've completely forgotten the Tylenol murders. Except, of course, for the survivors, the friends and families of the victims, Wikipedia contributors, and the investigators (do they contribute to the Wikipedia articles?).

The Tylenol murders led to some packaging changes; but I don't think they had a major impact on the American psyche.

The Anthrax murders, however, had a huge impact. Coming after 9/11 they were a part of the package that led to the invasion of Iraq (remember Saddam's mobile bioweapon facilities -- that turned out to be nothing at all?) . I suspect the direct attack on the Senate played a role in the powers the Senate freely granted Bush. If the Anthrax attack had not occurred, Bush's wartime status might have had a built-in renewal requirement.

Sadly, the vast impact of the Anthrax attack probably pleases the murderer.

Maybe forgetting is not the wisest thing to do. Maybe we should try to learn some lessons. How ought we to have responded? Why was such a high impact attack never replicated by a terrorist organization? Did the Senate lose its collective mind because of personal involvement? How could we prevent that happening again?

It would be marvelous to catch the killers of 1982 and 2001. Failing that, the best revenge would be to learn from our mistakes. We learned from the 1982 attacks, but I don't think we've learned enough from the 2001 murders.

Update: This post reminded me of one I wrote in 2003 about the Bush-Cheney smallpox fraud. That con job wouldn't have worked nearly as well but for the anthrax attacks.

History of the First Peoples - Charles Mann's 1491

Charles Mann wrote a 2002 article in the Atlantic about the human history of the Americas prior to the European invasion. This article became a 2004 NYT essay and then a well regarded 2006 book.

Most recently this letter to Brad DeLong, published on Brad's blog, is a great advert for the book (emphases mine) ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

... Pennington correctly observes that I "barely mentioned the horrible [e]ffects of the wars that went on between the whites and indians." This is because I was writing about demography and demographically they didn't amount to much. By the 18th century, disease had already wiped out 75-95% of the native population of the Americas. Indian warfare, awful as it often was, simply piled on another few percentage points to the mortality count.

... As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

...many European innovations were directly related to the existence of domestic animals. At the time of its construction, the Roman highway system had no direct equivalent in the Americas. Paved roads are obviously a sign of technological development, because you need them for large-scale transportation, right? But it would have been nuts for Indians to have built such roads, because they didn't have wheeled vehicles. And they didn't have wheeled vehicles (except as toys) because they didn't have horses, and they evidently calculated that the small gains in efficiency for human-powered vehicles was not worth the large costs in labor and materials to build highways, especially when rivers were an attractive alternative. (Compared to Europe, much of the Americas is river-rich.) So does this mean that Native America was less developed?

Lauren Tombari asks, "Wouldn´t there be some evidence of the many towns Desoto saw? Would there be ~100 million graves from the 95% death rate?" She will be happy to learn there is lots of evidence of the many towns seen by DeSoto. Although it is inexplicably absent from US history textbooks, there were literally thousands of mound cities and towns in the US Southeast and the Mississippi valley. Many have been destroyed, but my book, 1491, has a map of some of the main sites that remain. About the graves: the answer is no. In epidemics, people generally aren't buried, but left to die where they fall. The vast majority of those skeletons simply vanish. An example of this is the slaughter of the buffalo. We know from abundant historical records that less than 150 years ago hunters killed millions of bison in the Great Plains. Yet if you drive around there now, you don't see heaps of bones. The same, alas, happened to Indians. Of course it didn't happen to every Indian -- and there are many, many known Indian graveyards, so many that the federal government has passed special legislation to protect them.

... In this country, the French, Spanish, Dutch and English made more than 20 attempts to found colonies before the Pilgrims. All but one of them failed. The exception was Jamestown, in which almost 5 out of 6 colonists sent in the first 15 years died -- something that most people would regard as a failure. (St. Augustine, in Florida, was founded before Plimoth, but it was abandoned for years before being resettled, so I would count it as a failure, too.) Then comes the epidemic in New England, and suddenly, beginning with the Pilgrims, almost every English colony survives and thrives.

The thesis, in short, is that the pre-euro population of the Americas was tens of millions of people, perhaps 100 million. A larger population than the Europe of that time.

A possible counter-argument would be to ask why then did Amerindians not have their equivalent of the Euro's embedded bio-weapons? A population of that size should be able to support some very nasty viruses.

The Atlantic article argues that humans disseminated throughout the Americans long before 12,000 BCE, however I think recent gene data supports the 12,000 BCE date for all living descendants of the first people. Animal extinction and canine genomic data may also support the 12,000 BCE date. If 12,000 BCE is in fact the date for entrance to the Americas, that might also argue against such a vast population.

See also: Squanto's story, European rat plagues kill American rats, Mann's 2004 NYT essay, European dog diseases kill American dogs.

Regardless of the original population the euro "conquest" (inheritance, almost) of the Americas is an abject lesson in the awesome power of biological WMDs.

Quality crisis: software, hardware, publicly traded companies, food, toys and nations

My intuition has a reasonable, but not perfect, track record.

On the one hand I've been pretty good over the years with social and technological evolution. On the other hand I really don't understand why humanity is still in business forty years after the development of fusion weapons. I'm clearly missing something there.

Grains of salt advised. Anyway ...

My intuition is telling me that we have a 21st century "crisis of quality". I think this is related to some of my favorite themes, such as fraud (see esp. 21st century deception) and reputation management. It's demonstrated in the failures of the publicly traded company, our food and imported quality problems, and, I believe, the reelection of George Bush.

It may have its roots in anonymity, transience, and complexity.

Take my last week in the world of software and hardware for example:

• I spend an hour or so playing with Google's vaunted custom search only to discover their newest feature doesn't work.
  
• a trivially obvious bug in iPhoto 7 (iLife '08) destroys 3 family videos
• I discover you can't fully revert from Microsoft's buggy Office 2007 to their less buggy Office 2003
• I give up on my corporate XP box and rebuild, unable even now to say if the problem was hardware or software - or some interaction of flaws in both.
• I discover an emergent bug with IMAP interactions between multiple simultaneous user sessions of OS X Mail.app and Google's GMail implementation.
  

Yes. That's all in one week -- and I don't use either Vista or OS X 10.5.

That's a bad week.

Apple has a quality problem. Microsoft has a quality problem. Google has a quality problem.

The entire human world has a quality problem.

Except I seem to be the only one who's complaining.

Anyone else notice anything?

Ground zero in Pakistan: Informed Comment blog

Talking Points suggests Informed Comment: Global Affairs: Barnett Rubin as a source for understanding the global crisis of the week (month? year? decade?) -- Pakistan's crisis of governance.

I glanced at the most recent post and it felt good. Consistent with what I'd already understood, plausible details that extend what I've read in known reliable sources, a measured tone.

I'll be tracking it.

This is also an opportunity to thank the gods that Rumsfeld is gone and, though Cheney and Bush remain, the rest of America's military and political governance is in far saner hands than it was a year ago.

The nuclear apocalypses that should have happened

I've read of most of these before, but DI has a complete collection of publicly known nuclear attack false alarms like this one:

Damn Interesting » The Apocalypses That Might Have Been

.... Unlike the previous alerts, this event wasn't an error in the early-detection system, this missile was confirmed as real. Fearing the worst, the Russian military prepared to launch a full-scale counterattack against the United States. Planes were readied, and missiles sat waiting to launch a nuclear volley on selected targets in the United States at a moment's notice. Tensions were running so high within the Russian leadership that Russian President Boris Yeltsin activated his nuclear briefcase, enabling him to communicate with his top military advisers and review the situation online. This was the first time he had ever done so. Amidst this uncertainty, as many fingers nervously hovered over death-bringing buttons, word was received from Soviet military observers: the missile, while real, was not en route to Russia. It was a harmless research rocket headed for space...

Basically if soldiers had followed their orders properly you wouldn't be reading this and I wouldn't be writing it. In the unlikely event we were alive today, we'd be foraging for food. There certainly wouldn't be an Internet.

I really don't understand why human civilization is still around. I share the opinion of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project physicists -- there's no evidence to suggest that humans are capable of living with nuclear weapons.

Still. We're here. Apparently.

Odd.

On saving the world - Shtetl-Optimized

I've had a post bouncing around my head for a while. It's about saving the human world. (The rest of the world will do just fine - eventually. As my 8 yo says, history just keeps happening.)

I'm going to write that post - eventually. I'll try to write the main risks down (US-China conflicts, WMDs, cost of havoc, rapid environmental collapse and resulting socioeconomic disruptions, artificial minds [1], etc) and what a geek can do about them in the age of O'Reilly.

In the meantime, a post by Scott Aaronson (yes, two t, two a)...

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Procrastinating on the sidelines of history

... So, Al Gore. Look, I don’t think it reflects any credit on him to have joined such distinguished pacifists as Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat. I think it reflects credit on the prize itself. This is one of the most inspired choices a Nobel Peace Prize committee ever made, even though ironically it has nothing directly to do with peace.

With the release of An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason, it’s become increasingly apparent that Gore is the tragic hero of our age: a Lisa among Cletuses, a Jeffersonian rationalist in the age of Coulter and O’Reilly. If I haven’t said so more often on this blog, it’s simply because the mention of Gore brings up such painful memories for me.

In the weeks leading up to the 2000 US election, I could almost feel the multiverse splitting into two branches of roughly equal amplitude that would never again interact. In both branches, our civilization would continue racing into an abyss, the difference being that in one branch we’d be tapping the brakes while in the other we’d be slamming the accelerator. I knew that the election would come down to Florida and one or two other swing states, that the margin in those states would be razor-thin (of course no one could’ve predicted how thin), and that, in contrast to every other election I’d lived through, in this one every horseshoe and butterfly would make a difference. I knew that if Bush got in, I’d carry a burden of guilt the rest of my life for not having done more to prevent it.

The question was, what could a 19-year-old grad student at Berkeley do with that knowledge? How could I round up tens of thousands of extra Gore votes, and thereby seize what might be my only chance in life to change the course of history? I quickly ruled out trying to convince Bush voters, assuming them beyond persuasion. (I later found out I was wrong, when I met people who’d voted for Bush in 2000 but said they now regretted their decision. To me, it was as if they’d just noticed the blueness of the sky.)...

...In the end, though, the Nadertrading movement simply failed to reach enough of its target audience. The websites put up by me and others apparently induced at least 1,400 Nader supporters in Florida to vote for Gore — but 97,000 Floridians still voted for Nader. And as we know, Bush ended up “winning” the state by 537 votes...

Ah yes. Nader. There are no words.

But. We're not alone. Not completely.

[1] Even I wince when I write that. It's just so geeky. Tough.

Sachs Reith 2007 - Lecture Four - Social engineering

From Jeffrey Sachs' 4th Reith Lecture on alleviating poverty in Africa ...

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 - Lecture 4: Economic Solidarity for a Crowded Planet:

.. .The fourth challenge, excessive population growth, is similarly susceptible of practical and proven solutions. Fertility rates in rural Africa are still around 6 children or more. This is understandable, if disastrous. Poor families are worried about the high rates of child mortality, and compensate by having large families. Poor families lack access to contraception and family planning. Girls often are deprived of even a basic education, because the family cannot afford it, and are instead forced into early marriage rather than encouraged to stay in school. And the value placed on mothers' time is very low, in part because agricultural productivity is itself so low. With few opportunities to earn remunerative income, mothers are pushed - often by their husbands or the community - to have more children.

Yet, as shown by countless countries around the world, fertility rates will fall rapidly, and on a voluntary basis, if an orderly effort is led by government with adequate resources. Investments in child survival, contraceptive availability, schooling of children, especially girls, and higher farm productivity, can result in a voluntary decline in total fertility from around six to perhaps three or lower within a single decade. But these things will not happen by themselves. They require resources, which impoverished Africa lacks...

Ahhh. I have thought so much and so long about this very topic. The story of that would take far too long to tell, so instead I shall tell a story from the year 2015. It has been 3 years since the Zorgonians first landed their saucers at the UN ...

... No more disease. Our children shall live centuries. Zorgonian technologies will allow us unlimited energy production with no greenhouse gas emissions. It is all we have dreamed of, and yet ...

... The Zorgonians have not demanded any price, but already we can see that we must change to fit their complex world. We cannot interpret their alien emotions, but it is clear they have little patience or interest in our religious traditions. They are suggesting a program of aggressive eugenics; in their world there is no tolerance for the weak or the slow. Bleeding heart liberal or NASCAR fan -- neither win the favor of these alien peoples. To run with this pack, we must abandon all but the strong.

They offer us devices that will extend our mind and reason, but those who use them seem so different, so uninterested in the things we love and treasure ....

... Is their gift worth the price?

I trust the analogy is obvious. A wonderful prize offered, but a prize with a Faustian price. African peoples who accept Sach's agenda will be transformed, and they know that well. To us the transformation is worth the prize -- we don't particularly care for genital mutilation anyway. The recipient's opinions will vary.

When I was a 1st year medical student in 1982, still reeling from the the complex adventures of a year in Asia studying fertility programs, I wrote a long and garbled paper on social engineering for a McGill medical school elective course (my first use of a word processor by the way). It was clear, even back in 1982, that dramatic fertility transitions were associated with radical changes in social structures. Women, in particular, rose quickly. Many men saw their power base shrink. Mating preferences changed. Traditions were being destroyed, new social structures were emerging. Why not face this fact, I thought, and think about how to deliberately engineer the transition to technocentric modernity? There must be many ways to covertly destroy a social order and rebuild a new one....

My poor medical anthropology elective course supervisor nearly died, and my medical career almost ended before it began. I might as well have written a paper for Opus Dei advocating sainthood for Satan. I'm not quite sure how I survived.

I was a naive idiot. Also young. And yet, 25 years later, the reality has not changed. I hope and pray Africa will emerge from poverty, undergo a demographic transition, and flourish in a technocentric world. The price, however, will be high.

More whacko terrorists - is this why we're still standing?

Schneier is back. Actually, he was never gone. The feed I was using to track him had been abandoned; I finally decided to see why he was silent and found a new feed. That's a relief, I was worried when he didn't seem to be commenting on the routine incompetence of our guardians and government. This time he's reviewing the latest news of a terrible plot foiled, and putting it in the post-9/11 context ...

Schneier on Security: Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

... I don't think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker "terrorist." But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and -- regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue -- the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.

The most ridiculous JFK Airport-related story goes to the New York Daily News, with its interview with a waitress who served Defreitas salmon; the front-page headline blared, "Evil Ate at Table Eight."

Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.

The administration repeatedly credited the apprehension of Faris to the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping programs, even though it's just not true. The 9/11 terrorists were no different; they succeeded partly because the FBI and CIA didn't follow the leads before the attacks.

Even the London liquid bombers were caught through traditional investigation and intelligence, but this doesn't stop Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff from using them to justify (.pdf) access to airline passenger data.

Of course, even incompetent terrorists can cause damage. This has been repeatedly proven in Israel, and if shoe-bomber Richard Reid had been just a little less stupid and ignited his shoes in the lavatory, he might have taken out an airplane....

It's a great review, I encourage everyone to read the entire essay. Schneier has put a lot of related material in one place. So what lessons can we draw from this history?

Well, we already know our leadership is incompetent and that they inflate threats in order to further their political agendas. That's not a useful lesson. The more interesting trend is the matching incompetence of our terrorists.

The 9/11 crew had engineers among them. Engineers are dangerous. Since then we've had schizophrenics, cognitively disabled persons, people with personality disorders, and no real engineers that I know of. It's been a very unimpressive crowd. The only times they seem to get inventive is when undercover FBI agents give them ideas.

Imagine if Bruce Schneier were a terrorist. We wouldn't stand a chance. We're still standing because, as near as we can tell, our enemies have been unable to recruit geeks, intellectuals, and the nerdy special forces types that work for us. Maybe there's something about al Qaeda's 14th century agenda that doesn't appeal to anyone with insight.

I think George Bush has been (unintentionally) working very hard to recruit higher quality terrorists. I only hope he's been as unsuccessful with that effort as he's been with everything else he's touched, because the alternate theory is that we're only catching the idiots ...

Hacking war and the end of globalization: Wired interviews John Robb

Wired has a brief interview with John Robb. He's written a book on the modern warfare, with a subtitle of 'the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization'. From the interview it sounds a lot like the 'falling cost of havoc' stuff with a flavor of emergent networks, hacking war, distributed systems, etc. Fairly prosaic for anyone who's been awake since 2001.

The interesting part is the 'end of globalization'. I can't tell exactly what he means, but from the interview I gather he's saying the global supply chain is extremely vulnerable to disruption. The best way to "attack" the US is to attack our supply chain, since that would drive our economy into deep depression. Sounds plausible to me, the one caveat being the 'x factor'.

X factor? Whatever it is that has allowed us to avoid inevitable doom since Oct 31, 1952.

Trying to locate a science fiction story

I dimply recall reading a science fiction story or tv show whose plot went something like this:

• wealthy eccentric is puzzled by the continued survival of humanity after the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb
  
• wealthy guy employs cynical protagonist (neer do well political scientist with a past) to investigate
• protagonist cynically takes the money, but slowly begins to realize his employer is right -- there's no way humanity should still be around
• protagonist starts to close-in on the conspiracy (aliens of course) but then ...
  

I know "it's out there" :-). Anyone remember reading this? It might be from a long time back ...

Submit comments or just email at jfaughnan@spamcop.net

Why now? Blacksburg and Montreal

Within the past 20 years, in my hometown of Montreal (Quebec), there have been three sets of shootings of college students. One took place at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 (affiliated with the University of Montreal), another (smaller) at Concordia University, and one recently at Dawson College. In the first attack 14 women died, in the last the toll was limited only by courage, good fortune and rapid medical care.

The Polytechnique massacre led to stricter gun control laws in Canada. I believe the weapon used in the Dawson shooting was illegal in Canada, but it is widely sold in the US.

In the US there is Columbine and now Blacksburg.

Has anything changed? If we look back at the last fifty years in North America, and we adjust for population growth, will we see intermittent episodes of these events?

I suspect modern hand held weaponry is lighter and smaller, easier to acquire (even where it is not legal), easier to operate, more affordable and more lethal than the weapons of twenty years ago. Is technology change alone responsible for any increased lethality of school shootings? Or perhaps there's no clear pattern at all.

I can't imagine any easy fixes. NPR had an excellent program on US gun control recently. The universal judgment was that the NRA has been utterly victorious. They have cleared the board and crushed the opposition. The NRA made Bush president in 2000, and America learned its lesson. No American politician will dare challenge the NRA for at least a generation. I would not encourage challengers, I know when a cause is lost. For now.

Update 4/18/07: I've been thinking about this, of course. Given Mr. Seung-hui's age, the prevalence of disease, and the history we're given, there's a reasonable chance he was schizophrenic. If so, then the most pragmatic preventive actions, given the impossibility of weapon's control in America, is to focus on the disorder of schizophrenia. Should every university professor and staff-person be required to complete a program of study in schizophrenia and major depression? Should universities focus on improved early recognition and treatment procedures, and techniques to manage the very difficult intersection of culture and psychiatric disease? Above all, we need far more knowledge of how to prevent and treat schizophrenia, and we need to know methods to divert the victims of the disease from violent paths.

Diffusion of technology: armor penetratiing IEDs for cheap

The recipe required R&D funds. The implementation required only a semi-modern machine shop:

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room

...The Pentagon is claiming -- again -- the the Iranian government supplied the deadly 'explosively formed penetrators' (EFPs). But the more you study these devices -- which use an explosive charge to a convert disc-shaped metal 'lens' into a high-velocity slug capable of smashing through thick armor at an extended range –- the more likely they seem to be home-made in Iraq.

The USSR built a hydrogen bomb quickly -- once they had the US plans. This is the same thing, on a much smaller scale. All it took was for Iran to deliver the plans, which may or may not have had government involved. If Iran did do it they won't have left any fingerprints; their intelligence services are considered among the best on earth.

Welcome to the "age of the fast follower" (TM*). Chlorine truck bombs work the same way. It's hard to keep a technical age when the cost of havoc falls.

* just kidding

Oppenheimer and the falling cost of havoc

I've blogged tediously about the falling cost of havoc. I didn't know, though I might have guessed, that Oppenheimer was far ahead of me (genius does that)...

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb (The Atlantic, December 2006)

... In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer sketched the problem clearly. In an essay titled “The New Weapon,” he wrote: “Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy and the extent of the destruction.” Elaborating, he wrote,

None of these uncertainties can becloud the fact that it will cost enormously less to destroy a square mile with atomic weapons than with any weapons hitherto known to warfare. My own estimate is that the advent of such weapons will reduce the cost, certainly by more than a factor of ten, more probably by a factor of a hundred. In this respect only biological warfare would seem to offer competition for the evil that a dollar can do.

I suspct Oppenheimer would have been surprised by our continued survival. I think of that when I contemplate how much the cost of havoc has fallen since his day. Whether by angels, aliens, or some emergent property of humankind, we seem to have cheated the odds. I hope the angels aren't tiring ...

Talent, terrorism and the shoulders of giants

Yesterday I wrote (Gordon's Notes: 8/09: How talented is this group?) that I thought the talent level of al Qaeda’s team has been pretty low the past five years.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the current crop of suspects (some of whom will likely turn out to be innocent); particularly how many have engineering or science degrees from serious institutions, etc. That will tell us if George Bush's al Qaeda recruitment strategy is bearing fruit. If it turns out that this is a talented bunch then we have to give even more credit to Pakistani, UK and US counter-terrorism efforts. Given the size of the conspiracy, however, I suspect they’re dolts. No-one with any brains would launch an effort that big from the United Kingdom.

Today I give credit to two recent public radio shows for emphasizing another part of the talent puzzle. One show was part of a superb series on supermax prisons and solitary confinement, the other was an interview this morning with a remarkable counter-terrorism expert. I wish the latter kept a blog ...

First the supermax. The inmates at supermax prisons are not generally known for their creativity, insight, or intelligence. So I was surprised by the range of ingenious and lethal techniques they deployed to support violence, commerce, and recreation. A handful of innovators, combined with modern and traditional communication channels, intense motivation and ample time to scheme, and memetic selection, have delivered advanced techniques to the average prisoner. These men and women stand on "the shoulder of (nasty) giants".

Then the counter-terrorism specialist. He pointed out that a large range of modern terrorist methodologies seem to have been developed by a few unfortunately talented IRA engineers and specialists. Their techniques and technologies, developed during the 1950s to 1980s (perhaps with some KGB help as well?) have been widely disseminated though print and spoken methods (I’m sure the net helps too). Apparently some of this team continues to work gainfully in South America (guess where?), though it’s not clear how inventive they are nowadays. Terrorists too have shoulders to stand on.

So the British terrorists (they were British citizens and terrorists, so they’re British terrorists) may have been executing a derivative attack, and they may have been dolts, but a lot of knowledge has been packaged to a point that even dolts can execute it. Process improvement, knowledge management, and the falling costs of lethal weapons — it’s all a part of the falling cost of havoc.

Hezbollah, collective punishment, and the falling cost of havoc

In the winter of 2001 I thought a lot about the falling cost of havoc. Technology changes the course and nature of conflict, and the relation between states and entities.

The theme returns:

Israel Finding a Difficult Foe in Hezbollah - New York Times

.... Never before in history has a terrorist organization had such state-of-the-art military equipment,” from medium-range rockets and laser-guided antitank missiles to well-designed explosive mines that can cripple an advanced tank, General Amidror said.

The cost of advanced weaponry is falling relative to income. Offense is cheaper than defense. The "IED" (improvised explosive device) is not really improvised, and it has changed the balance of power in Iraq.

In time missiles that travel hundreds of miles, with a great deal of "intelligence" and optional remote guidance, will become commonplace.

We still haven't thought enough about how technology is changing the nature of conflict. I fear collective punishment and police states will become the rule. I wish we thought about this more.

Iranian bomb: Krauthamer and the cost of havoc problem.

The March 31st issue of Time Magazine included an essay by Charles Krauthamer. The essay is now behind a paywall, but a blog search found this excerpt (from a neoconservative-type web site). Emphases mine.

Clear and Present:

Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World

... We're now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.

We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant 'Death to America'—and Denmark(!)—and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new—medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects—but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.

That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for 'those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive' his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution's raison d'etre is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

Krauthamer starts the article by quoting Richard Feynman. The rumbling you hear is my old professor (ok, so I went to two of his Physics-X lectures ...) approaching a relativistic spin rate. Insults to the honored dead aside, let me deconstruct the essay as such:

• Fanaticism is not new, but the falling cost of havoc means it has a new significance for the survival of humanity.
• Iran's leader is a religious zealot who wants to bring on the end-time (elsewhere in the same issue it's noted that he now has strong support among the young for a nuclear program, albeit perhaps not for the end-time).
• Iran must be stopped, with a strong implication that military action will be required.

For the sake of discussion let's assume that President Ahmadinejad is indeed an apocalyptic madman. True, Saddam was accused of this as well and was found to actually quite calculating and not inclined to suicide. (Alas for us all, Saddam was no better at such calculations than were Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney). True, Bush has been accused of this and he's probably not suicidal. No matter, let's assume it's really true of Ahmadinejad.

What can and should we do in this case? I'd say, not damned much. Bush has dug a deep hole for us. Thanks to Bush Iran is stronger than ever, and US actions in Iraq have enormously strengthened Ahmadinejad's political base. Thanks to Bush the US has no credibility to push for sanctions, and no international support for any serious action. Probably the best we can do is horse trade to get China to take the lead on this, doing whatever they can do to slow things down. (Putin seems as blind and incompetent as Bush.)

Could we nuke Iran and solve the problem? Maybe their bomb would be delayed a few years, but probably not much more than that. In the meantime there'd be enormous sympathy for Iran, and in many circles there'd be support for an anonymous counter-strike against the US. Incidentally, this idea of nuking Iran is morally repugnant.

So, what can we do? We delay, retreat, appease and hope for a miracle. Voting the GOP out of the house this year, and the presidency in 2008, might help a bit.

Anyone who voted to reelect Bush is at least partly responsible for this mess. Competence matters, rationalism matters, thinking matters.

Cheap havoc: bio-weapons via eBay

In the fall of 2001 I wrote about the "falling cost of havoc". As you'll see from clicking on the above link, the phrase has not caught on.

Slashdot has a thread today about the falling cost of bio-weaponry. This is what 9/11 was all about. Terrorism, hatred, fanaticism -- all old news. Primate stuff.

Cheap havoc -- that's new. That's big. That's why we now have an undeclared 'surveillance society'. That's why 'Big Brother' is here to stay -- as long as we have an industrial state.

Incidentally, what would I have done about this sort of thing that the GOP (the one party ruler of America) hasn't done? Consider the inescapable NSA watch lists. If we can't avoid watch lists, we need to manage the consequences. We need epidemiologists to evalute predictive value of watch list criteria. We need review boards to look for injury due to false positives. We need compensation mechanisms to help people and families who's lives are damaged by false conviction without trial. We need penalties for misuse -- severe enough to make government be very careful. We need to ensure that the powerful are as vulnerable and as "watched" as the weak.

There are many things we as a people can do to make 'life in a bubble' less miserable than it has to be. It's not the freedom we used to know, but it could be a good life.

Bush, Cheney and their ilk are not doing these things -- and we as a people are not discussing the fundamental issues. The blame for where we are going falls upon them, upon their political supporters, and upon those who remain silent.

The falling cost of havoc - some numbers

I've long claimed that what we need to worry about is not al Qaeda in particular, but rather the falling cost of havoc. The Christian Science Monitor gives us some real world numbers, in an article explaining the limits of tracking financing:

Why terror financing is so tough to track down | csmonitor.com

This, experts say, is partly a result of the vigorous multinational effort since 9/11 to break up the Al Qaeda network and stanch the cash flows that sustained terror attacks. But it's also due to the reduced cost of mounting terror attacks, they say.

Estimates suggest that the 9/11 attacks may have cost as much as $500,000 to stage. By contrast, the Madrid bombings of 2004 are believed to have cost no more than $15,000, and last year's London attacks perhaps $2,000.Four bombs, four rucksacks, some train tickets, a little gasoline, and a few phone calls.

"Terrorist financing is very different today," says Loretta Napoleoni, author of "Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks." "Five years ago, we had large movement of funds which went through the international financial system.

"Now we are just talking about four friends who raise £1,000 to stage an attack," she adds. "The unit cost of terrorist financing has crashed to the floor. They [terrorists] don't need another 9/11. They can do a small thing and create the same hysteria."

A quick preview on the next thing to blow your world apart

Do it yourself. Almost. ... Dan's Data provides a quick update on the state of the art in 3 dimensional "printing". As in download the specs, run the illegal hacking software, and print yourself an anonymous encrypted cell phone. Ok, so we're not quite there yet. Soon though.

Alvin Toffler didn't know the half of it. (Or did he? Read the wikipedia article ...)

At last, the obvious begins to be discussed. It's the technology stupid.

INTEL DUMP - Be afraid... but be prepared

From an Atlantic article by a counterterrorism guru

... This 'war' will never be over, unlike the Civil War, the Vietnam War, or even the current war in Iraq. There will always be a threat that someone will blow up an airplane or a building or a container ship. Technology has changed the balance of power; it is easier for even a handful of people to threaten a community than it is for the community to defend itself. But while we have to live in danger, we don't have to live in fear...

I wrote this in October of 2001:

Over the past century technology has increased destructive power more than it has increased defensive capabilities. Technology, including communication networks and knowledge distribution, has brought to individuals and small groups (micro-powers) the capabilities once limited to nation states; the cost of acquiring and deploying nuclear and particularly biological weapons has decreased substantially. It has increased the harm potential of individuals and small groups. I sometimes call this the AIM problem, a pseudo-acronym for Affordable, Anonymous Instruments of Mass Murder. Our technologies are lowering the cost of the havoc, and the new weapons can be deployed anonymously. Anonymity means invulnerability. We cannot be anonymous, so we are are at an enormous disadvantage -- eventually contending against an invulnerable opponent with irresistible weapons.