Richard Posner on the 9/11 Commission Report

He’s not impressed. In a very good piece, he writes:

“The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy’s skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation’s intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.

That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report’s narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn’t occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures. The government knew that Al Qaeda had attacked United States facilities and would do so again. But the idea that it would do so by infiltrating operatives into this country to learn to fly commercial aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings was so grotesque that anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures to prevent such an event would have been considered a candidate for commitment. No terrorist had hijacked an American commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since 1986. Just months before the 9/11 attacks the director of the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency wrote: ”We have, in fact, solved a terrorist problem in the last 25 years. We have solved it so successfully that we have forgotten about it; and that is a treat. The problem was aircraft hijacking and bombing. We solved the problem. . . . The system is not perfect, but it is good enough. . . . We have pretty much nailed this thing.” In such a climate of thought, efforts to beef up airline security not only would have seemed gratuitous but would have been greatly resented because of the cost and the increased airport congestion.”

He concludes:

“The report ends on a flat note. But one can sympathize with the commission’s problem. To conclude after a protracted, expensive and much ballyhooed investigation that there is really rather little that can be done to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being done already, at least if the focus is on the sort of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past rather than on the newer threats of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, would be a real downer — even a tad un-American. Americans are not fatalists. When a person dies at the age of 95, his family is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or structure and let’s change them and then we’ll be safe. Actually, the strategies and structure weren’t so bad; they’ve been improved; further improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven’t a clue as to how to prevent.”

Cropping and context

My sunset picture has already puzzled at least one reader. The diagonal line is the top bar of a gate which was wet from the rain. A small pool of rainwater, clinging to the surface of the bar via surface tension, was reflecting the pink cloud. But the picture becomes even more puzzling if it’s cropped to remove the sky — like this. Now it looks as though some strange distorted goldfish is swimming in the pool. The camera may not always lie, but it can be darned enigmatic sometimes.

Why are business books so awful

I thought it was just me. I always get depressed when I pass the ‘business and management’ section in an airport bookshop. How can people write such gibberish? And why would anyone read it? The only explanation I can think of is that most managers spend their entire working lives trying (unsuccessfully) to keep chaos at bay, and delude themselves that if only they could discover The Secret then they will get on top of things. This is a delusion because there is no secret: chaos comes with the territory. But how nice to find the learned Economist weighing in on my side. Quote:

“If you want to profit from your pen, first write a bestselling business book. In few other literary genres are the spin-offs so lucrative. If you speak well enough to make a conference of dozing middle managers sit up, your fortune is made. You can, says Mark French of Leading Authorities, a top speaking agency, make a seven-figure income from speechifying alone.

Given this strong motivation to succeed, it is astonishing how bad most business books are. Many appear to be little more than expanded PowerPoint presentations, with bullet points and sidebars setting out unrelated examples or unconnected thoughts. Some read like an extended paragraph from a consultant’s report (and, indeed, many consultancies encourage their stars to write books around a single idea and lots of examples from the clientele). Few business books are written by a single author; lots require a whole support team of researchers. And all too many have meaningless diagrams.”

The malware problem

The problem of malicious software is the computing world’s equivalent of global warming — except that the timescales are much shorter. The most effective way of doing something about it quickly is to educate computer users so that they become less vulnerable — which is why my colleagues and I have been beavering away on an online course aimed at a non-specialist audience. One of our problems we had was communicating to people how serious the problem is. Here’s a nice opinion piece by Martin Kelly on “The Polluted Internet” which does the job nicely. Here’s a sample:

“If you live in a major metropolitan city where high bandwidth connections are as common as your plain old telephone service, take a look at your firewall and IDS logs. It’s not exciting at all, but you should do it. Compare the results with what you saw even just six months ago. Unwanted packets from worms and trojans are now hitting your network every second. New viruses, old viruses, mutated viruses, you name it. Big worms, fast worms, and worms that have been alive for years, they all reach my firewall and are silently stopped. Nothing new.

The only thing new about this is the magnitude of the problem.

Stare into the light

If you have a cable or DSL modem at home, pause and reflect for a minute as you look into the light. Let me explain.

Take a few short moments to watch the receive light on your modem or unfettered ethernet connection. Here in high bandwidth Canada, that flashing light now flashes almost solid. It’s almost unbelievable. It’s almost all malicious traffic.”

Cloud pool

There was a beautiful sunset tonight after a torrential shower.

Anatomy of a software bug

Anyone who doubts that modern software is unsustainably complex should have a look at this detailed account by Microsoft developer Rick Schaut about how he tracked down a well-known bug in Word. He’s also good on the notion of complexity:

“In this context, ‘complexity’ doesn’t refer to the code itself. Rather, we’re talking about the shear [sic] volume of things the user can do. In Word, for example, we have:

* More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function)

* More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands)

* At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate)

With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Leica site has a Book of Condolence for HC-B, who probably did more than anyone else to make the Leica synonomous with high-quality photo-reportage. It’s accompanied by this picture. Note the way he cradles the camera to make it unobtrusive to others. He looks as though he’s dressed for a funeral. Wonder when this was taken.

The Great Leap Sideways

Here’s an interesting fact. Of the three great mass-murdering tyrants of the 20th century, two — Hitler and Stalin — are comprehensively excoriated. Nobody in Germany outside of neo-Nazi crazies publicly admires Hitler (though there is an interesting film coming about the last days in the Bunker which attempts to portray him as a human being). Ditto with Stalin in the former Soviet Union. But Mao Zedong is still a fixture in Chinese state iconography.

There are still pictures of the old brute everywhere, and the ruling Communist Party has come up with an interesting mathematical formula which takes care of the fact that he was responsible for the murder of tens of millions of his fellow countrymen: Mao, says the current regime, was “70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad”.

Which brings us neatly to the question of Tony Blair. The difficulty UK voters will have in next year’s General Election is that, with the exception of Iraq and a small number of other indefensible policies or decisions, New Labour is still the best government likely to be available. The Tories are in chaos and possibly in terminal decline. The Liberal Democrats are, well, the Liberal Democrats. So in the end voters will be faced with the conundrum: is Tony Blair 80 per cent good and 20 per cent bad? Or should the ratio be 30/70?

High-tech masks

The kids have been playing with K’Nex (“the world’s most creative toy”). Interestingly, they don’t always use it to make ‘machines’. Instead they do things like this.

What’s interesting about K’Nex is that it escapes from the ‘mechanical’ rigidity of products like Lego (and ye olde Meccano) and introduces flexibility and connectivity more like what one finds in nature. Clever stuff.

Longhorn now to be Shorthorn

Microsoft announced yesterday that Longhorn, the next release of Windows, will still ship in 2006, but only in a stripped down form. It will still have Indigo though, which is the bit that could have the biggest impact.