Getting your excuses in early

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The great Irish second-row forward, Willie John McBride, was famous for his strategy of “getting your retaliation in first”. Now the head of one of Britain’s security agencies has adapted the idea for modern circumstances: get your excuses in early.

The head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has called for new powers to help fight Islamist extremism, warning of a dangerous imbalance between increasing numbers of terrorist plots against the UK and a drop in the capabilities of intelligence services to snoop on communications.

Parker described the Paris attack as “a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm” and said he had spoken to his French counterparts to offer help.

Speaking to an invited audience at MI5 headquarters, he said the threat level to Britain had worsened and Islamist extremist groups in Syria and Iraq were directly trying to orchestrate attacks on the UK. An attack on the UK was “highly likely” and MI5 could not give a guarantee it would be able to stop it, he said.

“Strikingly, working with our partners, we have stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone,” he said. “Deaths would certainly have resulted otherwise. Although we and our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything.”

The hidden agenda of the speech is, of course, to ensure that surveillance capabilities of the security and intelligence agencies are not constrained by any namby-pamby concerns about privacy and civil liberties. (The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament is currently completing an investigation following the Snowden revelations. Having given evidence to the inquiry, I do not expect much change, but senior securocrats never leave anything to chance.)

Parker’s speech has had the desired impact on UK media — respectful, overly-credulous media coverage, with the BBC Today Programme asserting that we are all “nervous” as a result of what’s happened in Paris. Sir Malcolm Rifkind — the Chairman of the ISC Committee and Parker’s ostensible overseer — added his voice to the chorus, asserting that the two Paris attackers must have been communicating with Yemen; the implication was that these communications ought to have been monitored and intercepted. Which led one to wonder how Rifkind knew this. But his message was clear: don’t mess with our surveillance capabilities.

So far, the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo massacre has followed the standard pattern: terrorist atrocity –> outrage –> massive publicity –> calls for more surveillance and more resources for intelligence agencies. One wonders when it will occur to people that this is a positive feedback loop (aka a vicious circle). Given the statistical probability that there will be more atrocities, and that the security services will miss some of them (as the MI5 chief predicts), we’re heading for a full-blown national security state. In which case Bin Laden will have won, hands down.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. Maybe it’d be worth trying a different approach to these terrorist threats. As Paul Bernal puts it:

If the resources – time, money, energy, intelligence – currently put into mass surveillance systems that are unproven, have huge and damaging side-effect, and are even potentially counterproductive, were, instead, devoted to a more intelligent, targeted approach, it might even be that counterterrorism is more effective. We should be looking for new ways, not going down paths that are costly in both financial and human terms.

The fundamental problem is that terrorism, by its very nature, is hard to deal with. That’s something we have to face up to – and not try to look for silver bullets. No amount of technology, no level of surveillance, will solve that fundamental problem. We shouldn’t pretend that it can.

Paris: the by-product

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Right on cue: General Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA, commenting on the Paris killings.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: Let me be a little dark here: there really are no solutions, this is a condition. We can manage the condition better, we can make these attacks somewhat less likely or lethal but without changing the character of our society we can’t make them go away all together. Let me add another thought: About 12 months ago I talked about these massive amounts of metadata the NSA held in storage, that metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the French services pick up cell phones related to the attack and ask the Americans where have you seen these phones active globally.

Canine Wisdom

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I love the New Yorker dog cartoons. (Remember the 1993 one of one mutt explaining to another that “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”?)

I’ve just come on another classic. Two dogs are walking past a picket fence. One is saying: “It’s always ‘Sit’, ‘Stay’, ‘Heel’ — never ‘Think’, ‘Innovate’, ‘Be Yourself’.”

Which reminds me, perversely, of a New Yorker cat joke. A man, about to go out through his front door, is pointing to a litter-tray and saying to his cat, “Don’t you dare think outside of the box”.

The Paris massacre: journalism is in the front line, but what kind of journalism?

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Interesting comment by Charlie Beckett.

What struck me was how weird it is that these people — and they do deserve the label ‘terrorist’ — have struck against cartoonists. Not drone manufacturers or military bases, diplomats, politicians or financiers, but satirists. It shows what we should have already known. That journalism is part of the ideological war. It is the front-line.

That makes it all the more important that journalists respond thoughtfully and responsibly. I am not going to tell editors what they should publish in relation to this story. But it would be good if their response is in the best tradition of liberal, positive journalism and not just an angry, lashing out that feeds the fear that helps sustain those who perpetrate the violence.

On the other hand, commenting on the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2011, the Time Bureau Chief in Paris at the time wrote this:

It’s obvious free societies cannot simply give in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group. And it’s just as clear that intimidation and violence must be condemned and combated for whatever reason they’re committed—especially if their goal is to undermine freedoms and liberties of open societies. But it’s just evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.

The takedown boom

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From Ars Technica:

Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that Google removed 75 percent more URLs in 2014 than it did the previous year. Google doesn’t tally up annual totals, but it does release weekly reports on DMCA notices, and TorrentFreak took it upon itself to add up the weekly reports. Most of the takedown requests are honored. Google has a longstanding tradition of supplying DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, a website that archives such requests.

Just a few years back, the number of takedown requests could be measured in the dozens, not the millions. In 2008, Google handled 62 DMCA takedown requests, and, in that year, each request was over just one copyrighted work. In later years, DMCA notices came to ask for millions of URLs to be removed to protect multiple works.

In a digital cacaphony, we need journalism more, not less

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Great blog post by George Brock, who thinks that disintermediation is not an unalloyed good, and that sometimes intermediaries are important and necessary. Extract:

What I’m trying to catch with the term “re-intermediation” is this. The way journalism’s intermediary role works has been massively altered, but the need for that function never went away. Whether or not we define it as journalism done by people called “journalists”, people need and want selection, distilling and interpretation.

Never lose sight of the fact that perhaps the single largest change underlying the “digital era” is the simple increase in the quantity and velocity of information moving between people. That proliferation increases the need for intermediary help, not the other way round. Organising and clarifying information (something that social networks do) can create value.

To me, the story of the last few years is one of regular, gentle reminders that raw, unsorted information has few fans. It’s obviously true that in the digital era someone who wants their information uncontaminated by journalism has a much better chance of getting it. But information sifted, verified, clarified and – yes – packaged has the greater appeal.

He’s right. I’ve been a subscriber to the Economist for many years not because I share its ideological views but because it’s a pretty good sieve that often highlights stuff that I might not have spotted otherwise and to which I ought to be paying attention.

Also: on the over-reach of disintermediation. Travel agents are usually the standard case study of intermediaries swept away by the wave of creative destruction. So we — the customers — now do all the bureaucracy associated with booking our air travel. So it’s only when you have to plan a complicated, non-standard trip that you realise how useful a knowledgeable intermediary can be.

The best camera…

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seascape

… is always the one you happen to have with you. In Ireland last weekend I carried a Nikon DSLR but wound up mostly using my iPhone6 because it was so much better at handling the (difficult) light. The Apple camera is very impressive, especially in situations where HDR capability is needed to manage the luminance range. This isn’t a particularly good picture, but the scene completely defeated the Nikon.

Ye olde reality distortion fields

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The strangest thing about Downton Abbey, the reality distortion field masquerading as costume drama, is not that it has been captivating British audiences — for the Brits are congenitally susceptible to this kind of class-ridden crap — but that it is apparently a big hit in the US, which supposedly is a more egalitarian, less deferential society.

Also interesting is the coincidence that — as Thomas Piketty has shown — levels of inequality in the US are now approaching what they were in Britain when Downton Abbey was in its heyday. Wonder how many of those addled American Downton addicts realise that?

Imbecility rules ok?

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Appearances notwithstanding, we are not governed by imbeciles. Our problem is that we are governed by unscrupulous politicians who see imbecility as the way to the voter’s heart. Step forward Theresa May, the current Miss Whiplash of the Tory front bench, who wants a solemn commitment in the next Tory Manifesto to expel all foreign graduate students after they graduate and make them apply from abroad for visas to work in the UK. Yes, you read that correctly. She wants to force bright young foreigners, who come to do research degrees in the UK because we have some great universities, to leave the moment they become available for work in our knowledge-based industries.

Here’s how James Dyson, the entrepreneur and inventor puts it:

Train ’em up. Kick ’em out. It’s a bit shortsighted, isn’t it? A short-term vote winner that leads to long-term economic decline. Of course the government needs to be seen to be “doing something”. But postgraduate research in particular leads to exportable, patentable technology. Binning foreign postgraduates is, I suppose, a quick fix. But quick fixes don’t build long-term futures. And that’s exactly what many researchers are doing.

Bright sparks are drawn to the UK for good reason – our universities are among the best in the world. Particularly for science and engineering. Yet the Home Office wants to say cheerio to these sharp minds as soon as their mortarboards land on college lawns. The moment research is finished students are forced back to their homelands, from where the home secretary is happy to allow them to apply for jobs in Britain. Not exactly motivating. Not exactly practical. This is an abrupt departure from an equally unworkable idea that after their research they have two months to be employed, otherwise they are ejected. No wonder fewer than 10% bother to try to stay.

Our borders must remain open to the world’s best. Give them our knowledge, allow them to develop their own and permit them to apply it on our shores. Their ideas and inventiveness will create technology to export around the world.

The interesting question, of course, is why Miss Whiplash thinks that her daft policy idea will be a vote-winner in a closely-fought election? The logical inference is that she thinks that voters are imbeciles. In which case she is following in the footsteps of one of her heroes, Winston Churchill, who famously observed that “the best argument against democracy is five minutes’ conversation with the average voter”.

Sigh.