The Bamiyan Buddhas were infamously destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban in Afghanistan. A similar tragedy is unfolding in West Africa as Islamic fundamentalists are now destroying Islamic shrines and cultural heritage in Mali.

Earlier this year a coup in Mali was linked to the destabilization of the northern half. Military leaders hoped to squash rebellion but instead created a greater mess. The emergent political void was filled by militant rebels of the Tuareg, an ethnic group who has sought independence for more than fifty years as I’ve written before:

In brief: the Tuareg (who call themselves Kel Tamsheq) live in the southern Sahara, dispersed across the borders of several countries including Algeria, Mali, Libya, and Niger. Despite this separation they share a common language apparently related to Berber. They are perhaps most known historically for establishing the north African city Timbuktu in the 10th century near the Niger river and fostering trade including scholarship, literature and books.

They were essentially tribes of caravans around the Sahara with agricultural work performed by non-Tuareg serfs. Fast forward several hundred years to their fierce resistance to French colonization in the 1890s — colonial guns against swords of the nomads. The French feared them as raiders, which led to massacres of the nomadic minority. They were thus forced to sign treaties that led to oppression by the state. Their attempt to gain autonomy during the Mali independence movement in the 1960s failed and so they struggled as dislocated minorities through severe African drought in the 1970s and 1980 that devastated their livelihood. With little or no control of government, and rampant corruption, foreign aid rarely was distributed where it was needed most.

Their suffering resulted in a cultural revival and rebellion. By the start of the 1990s the Tuareg attempted again to gain more autonomy in Niger and Mali through armed resistance. This led many into years of rebel training camps, imprisonment and even exile to Mauritania, Algeria and Burkina Faso. The mid-1990s, finally saw cease-fire agreements and they are apparently doing better under President Konare.

Also interested in control of the territory are fundamentalist groups such as the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), the radical Ansar Dine, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). These different groups initially worked under a common plan to establish control and setup a governing council. Things soon fell apart.

Last month representatives from the neighboring country Algeria brokered a meeting between the various rebels. It was soon clear that the MUJAO were intent on nothing less than forcing the territory into a fundamentalist Islamic state. That put them at odds with the Mouvement National de liberation de l’Azawad (MNLA), who expressed interest in a secular nation.

From a Western view it might be easiest to characterize the differences between secular and fundamentalist Islamic rebels in terms of their view of Westerners. Those with ties to al-Qaeda terrorist factions will try to capture or kill Europeans in Mali. Ansar Dine, for example, is led by a man trained by Pakistanis for jihad who amassed wealth by being involved in the business of kidnappings. Beyond this man’s distaste for secularism he clearly has a hatred of Westerners and is unlikely to form relations with non-Islamic states.

In contrast the MNLA are Tuareg and veterans of the Libyan army who already have strong ties to Western nations. The destabilization of Libya may have been a turning point that exposed Mali to rebellion; the Western-backed offensive in Libya enabled soldiers there to leave and create pressure in north Mali for ethnic sovereignty. These Islamic rebels have a very different profile from the jihadists, as noted in a harrowing tale of escape by two British during the coup.

…they were made an unexpected offer: the French embassy had contacts with secular Tuareg-led MNLA rebels who were offering them safe passage away from al-Qaeda factions searching the streets for Westerners.

That is why it is not surprising to read about a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist leader just reported as a casualty in a fight with the MNLA.

Dans un communiqué rendu public hier, le Conseil transitoire de l’Etat de l’Azawad (CTEA, ex-MNLA) annonce la mort de Mokhtar Belmokhtar, alias «Belaouar», alias «Khaled Abou El Abbès», lors des affrontements armés l’ayant opposé au Mujao, le 27 juin, à Gao, ville du nord du Mali.

Although I have been watching the devolution of the country for years, I was hopeful Tuareg nationalists and secularists could work out a resolution with the religious fundamentalists. The best case would been negotiations to stabilize borders with Algeria and Niger, which in itself is a complicated problem given concern for ethnic nationalists living across them as I’ve written about before. Instead the heritage of the secularists appears to be threatened directly by fundamentalists and Mali is in danger of losing control to trained jihadists, which would expand the fight from from Algeria/Niger all they way into southern Mali…and create links into other jihadist struggles.

The difference between the nationalist-secularists and the fundamentalists is thus significant and a serious test of Tuareg nationalism. When Timbuktu was seized by the rebels in late May, fundamentalists threatened to destroy the historic site of Islamic learning that would obviously be a source of pride to a Tuareg nationalist.

The fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam objects to the veneration of saints’ tombs, maintaining that it amounts to saint worship.

“Salafis do not want there to be any intermediary between the believer and God. It looks like Ansar Dine is going after shrines just like other groups have done in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia”…

Some have suggested that attacks on shrines in Timbuktu by Islamic fundamentalists would be met by local resistance but thus far it has not materialized. Instead, yesterday the threats were realized and Islamic shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed.

“The tombs of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya in Timbuktu were destroyed Saturday by the Islamists… who are heading towards other tombs,” said one witness, whose report was confirmed by the source close to the imam.

In addition to three historic mosques, Timbuktu is home to 16 cemeteries and mausoleums, according to the UNESCO website.

When I was a full-time student of Cold War history I had to study how the constant watch by an unknown yet omnipresent force affected people. In American classrooms that meant asking questions about the legacy of the 1968 Prague Spring or trying to prove whether Marshal Josip Broz Tito was really as popular as reported publicly.

If you clicked on the links above you will see that I believe some of the best sources for an answer could be from literary and artistic writers. There are classics like The Trial by Kafka and 1984 by Orwell, but we also gain excellent insights from modern work such as The Lives of Others by Donnersmarck.

The real story, however, is not just about the situation in someone else’s backyard. Surveillance society is a risk everywhere and is inextricably linked to advances in communication. It thus seems inevitable to find warnings at home of a “double-edge” to technology. A good example is the historic criticism by U.S. Senator Frank Church of an American-based system meant to spy on the Soviets.

“…this capability at any time could be turned around on the American people” he said in 1975, “and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. “could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

He was wrong. A dictator is not necessary to achieve what many would consider tyranny, at least if you take into account definitions put forward by the likes of Kafka and Orwell. And the N.S.A. giant spy center is not the only one to consider.

He also was right. The capability officially has been turned around on the American people.

CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications.

And that brings me back to the study of surveillance in the Cold War. The British classroom forced me to expand the scope of discussion. We had to spend many hours debating and trying to make sense of policies all over the world where analysts collected data on citizens to enforce laws and inform leaders. One of the things that stood out to me was how citizen behavior altered in some versions of surveillance, but not others. The difference appeared to me linked to a sense of value and opportunity.

If collection of information is in any way perceived by an individual as a threat to their success then countermeasures are a natural reaction. It was only when risk from surveillance was not perceived (e.g. “I have nothing to hide”), or a greater alternate threat was proposed (e.g. surveillance will save you from a worse fate) that someone might be expected to comply without question.

What countermeasures? We destroy a trail or hide it. In terms of security, people use integrity and confidentiality controls to fight surveillance. The tricky part is that we enjoy and want social approval; it gives the ability to see a more circumspect view. But on the other hand we do not want to feel as though we are being monitored to the point where we are boxed in by our every decision (i.e. the dilemma of whether to have a heavy or light existence, as expressed in the Unbearable Lightness of Being)

Countermeasures might not always be the right term. I am reminded of Manuel Castells’ 1996 book The Rise of the Network Society. He emphasized that a globally interconnected communication system was unlikely to make a work force go completely mobile. He showed that people prefer to keep local social attachment (e.g. owning a house, living near family and friends) intact. However, other social structures such as labor relationships were not as stable. They could evolve because more opportunities would be available and it would make part-time and temporary work the norm.

Thus, rather than call them countermeasures, we tend to keep only trails intact where we perceive value and limited risk. Cycling through connections when more connections are offered at low cost becomes a new norm, which can cause problems for those interested in data collection and analysis.

With that in mind, I noted recently big data researchers saying that their subjects are fighting back.

Ms. Boyd has made a specialty of studying young people’s behavior on the Internet. She says they are now often seeking power over their environment through misdirection, such as continually making and destroying Facebook accounts, or steganography, a cryptographic term for hiding things in plain sight by obscuring their true meaning. “Someone writes, ‘I’m sick and tired of all this,’ and it gets ‘liked’ by 32 people,” she said. “When I started doing my fieldwork I could tell you what people were talking about. Now I can’t.”

Now. Just like in history. The behavior she describes sounds like exactly what could be expected in a surveillance society that has a low cost to connection cycles. What does this mean in terms of future behavior? It’s not clear who the best artistic writers will be yet but there may be much more lightness ahead.

For example, in the past there was a desire in America to make a phone number portable to maintain continuity across providers, but the new trend appears to be more like what Castells predicted and numbers have short-term or temporary use. Another example is demand for peer-based key management, instead of server, for mobile devices. A third example is demand for sandboxes and hypervisors to create safe havens of communication. Hiding or destroying the trail of an application, a machine or even an entire data center, is more possible than ever through virtualization.