For several years I have tried to speak openly about why I find it disappointing that analysts rely heavily (sometimes exclusively) on language to determine who is a foreigner.
They are making some funny and highly improbable assumptions: … The attackers used Chinese language attack tools, therefore they must be Chinese. This is a reverse language bias that brings back memories of L0phtCrack. It only ran in English.
Here’s the sort of information I have presented most recently for people to consider:
You see above the analysts tell a reporter that presence of a Chinese language pack is the clue to Chinese design and operation of attacks on Russia. Then further investigation revealed the source actually was Korea. Major error, no? It seems to be reported as only an “oops” instead of a WTF.
At a recent digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) meeting I pointed out that the switch from Chinese to Korean origin of attacks on Russia of course was a huge shift in attribution, one with potential connections to the US.
This did not sit well with at least one researcher in the audience. “What proof do you have there are any connections from Korea to the US” they yelled out. I assumed they were facetiously trying to see if I had evidence of an English language pack to prove my point.
In retrospect they may actually have been seriously asking me to offer clues why Korean systems attacking Russia might be linked to America. I regret not taking the time to explain what clues more significant than a language pack tend to look like. Cue old history lesson slides…but I digress.
A traitorous Confederate flag flies from an American M4 (A3E8?) in the “Forgotten War“
Here’s another slide from the same talk I gave about attribution and language. I point to census data with the number and location of Chinese speakers in America, and most popular languages used on the Internet.
Unlike McAfee, mentioned above, FireEye and Mandiant have continued to ignore the obvious and point to Chinese language as proof of someone being foreign.
Consider for a moment that the infamous APT1 report suggests that language proves nothing at all. Here is page 5:
Unit 61398 requires its personnel to be…proficient in the English language
Thus proving APT1 are English-speaking and therefore not foreigners? No, wait, I mean proving that APT1 are very dangerous because you can never trust anyone required to be proficient in English.
But seriously, Mandiant sets this out presumably to establish two things.
First, “requires to be proficient” is a subtle way to say Chinese never will do better than “proficient” (non-native) because, foreigners.
Second, the Chinese target English-speaking victims (“Only two victims appear to operate using a language other than English…we believe that the two non-English speaking victims are anomalies”). Why else would the Chinese learn English except to be extremely targeted in their attacks — narrowing their focus to basically everywhere people speak English. Extremely targeted.
And then on page 6 of APT1 we see supposed proof from Mandiant of something else very important. Use of a Chinese keyboard layout:
…the APT1 operator’s keyboard layout setting was “Chinese (Simplified) – US Keyboard”
On page 41 (suspense!) they explain why this matters so much:
…Simplified Chinese keyboard layout settings on APT1’s attack systems, betrays the true location and language of the operators
Mandiant gets so confident in where someone is from based on assessing language they even try to convince the reader that Americans do not make grammar errors. Errors in English (failed attempts at proficiency) prove they are dealing with a foreigner.
Their own digital weapons betray the fact that they were programmed by people whose first language is not English. Here are some examples of grammatically incorrect phrases that have made it into APT1’s tools
It is hard to believe this is not meant as a joke. There is a complete lack of linguistic analysis, for example, just a strange assertion about proficiency. In our 2010 RSAC presentation on the linguistics of threats we give analysis of phrases and show how syntax and spellings can be useful to understand origins. I can only imagine what people would have said if we tried to argue “Bad Grammar Means English Ain’t Your First Language”.
Of course I am not saying Mandiant or others are wrong to have suspicion of Chinese connections when they find some Chinese language. Despite analysts wearing clothes with Chinese language tags and using computers that probably have Chinese language print there may be some actual connections worth investigating further.
My point is that the analysis offered to support conclusions has been incredibly weak, almost to the point of being a huge distraction from the quality in the rest of the reports. It makes serious work look absurd when someone over-emphasizes language spoken as proof of geographic location.
Now, in some strange twist of “I told you so”, the Twittersphere has come alive with condemnation of an NSA analyst for relying to heavily on language.
Thank you to Chris and Halvar and everyone else for pointing out how awful it is when the NSA does this kind of thinking; please also notice how often it happens elsewhere.
More people need to speak out against this generally in the security community on a more regular basis. It really is far too common in far too many threat reports to be treated as unique or surprising when the NSA does it, no?
The Congo had 20 million people in 1885. Belgian King Leopold II then colonized it as his private white police state, which tortured and killed up to 10 million people.
Full disclosure: I spent my undergraduate and graduate degree time researching the ethics of intervention with a focus on the Horn of Africa. One of the most difficult questions to answer was how to define colonialism. Take Ethiopia, for example. It was never colonized and yet the British invaded, occupied and controlled it from 1940-1943 (the topic of my MSc thesis at LSE).
I’m not saying I am an expert on colonialism. I’m saying after many years of research including spending a year reading original papers from the 1940s British Colonial office and meeting with ex-colonial officers, I have a really good sense of how hard it is to become an expert on colonialism.
Since then, every so often, I hear someone in the tech community coming up with a theory about colonialism. I do my best to dissuade them from going down that path. Here came another opportunity on Twitter from Zooko:
This short post instantly changed my beliefs about global development. “The Dawn of Cyber-Colonialism” by @GDanezis
If nothing else, I would like to encourage Zooko and the author of “dawn of Cyber-Colonialism” to back away from simplistic invocations of colonialism and choose a different discourse to make their point.
Maybe I should start by pointing out an irony often found in the anti-colonial argument. The usual worry about “are we headed towards colonialism” is tied to some rather unrealistic assumptions. It is like a thinly-veiled way for someone to think out loud: “our technology is so superior to these poor savage countries, and they have no hope without us, we must be careful to not colonize them with it”.
A lack of self-awareness in commercial views is an ancient factor. John Stuart Mill, for example in the 1860s, used to opine that only through a commercial influence would any individual realize true freedom and self-governance; yet he feared colonialists could spoil everything through not restraining or developing beyond their own self-interests. His worry was specifically that colonizers did not understand local needs, did not have sympathy, did not remain impartial in questions of justice, and would always think of their own profits before development. (Considerations on Representative Government)
I will leave the irony of the colonialists’ colonialism lament at this point, rather than digging into what motivates someone’s concern about those “less-developed” people and how the “most-fortunate” will define best interests of the “less-fortunate”.
People tend to get offended when you point out they may be the ones with colonialist bias and tendencies, rather than those they aim to criticize for being engaged in an unsavory form of commerce. So rather than delve into the odd assumptions taken among those who worry, instead I will explore the framework and term of “colonialism” itself.
Everyone today hates, or should hate the core concepts of colonialism because the concept has been boiled down so much to be little more than an evil relic of history.
A tempting technique in discourse is to create a negative association. Want people to dislike something? Just broadly call it something they already should dislike, such as colonialism. Yuck. Cyber-colonialism, future yuck.
However, using an association to colonialism actually is not as easy as one might think. A simplified definition of colonialism tends to be quite hard to get anyone to agree upon. The subjugation of a group by another group through integrated domination might be a good way to start the definition. And just look at all the big words in that sentence.
More than occupation, more than unfair control or any deals gone wrong, colonialism is tricky to pin down because of elements of what is known as “colonus” and measuring success as agrarian rather than a nomad.
Perhaps a reverse view helps clarify. Eve Tuck wrote in “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” that restoration from colonization means being made whole (restoration of ownership and control).
Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.
The exit-barrier to colonialism is not just a simple change to political and economic controls, and it’s not a competitive gain, it’s undoing systemic wrongs to make things right.
After George Zimmerman unjustly murdered Trayvon Martin — illegally stole a man’s life and didn’t pay for it — the #blacklivesmatter movement was making the obvious case for black lives to be valued. Anyone arguing against such a movement that values human life, or trying to distract from it with whataboutism (trying to refocus on lives that are not black), perpetuates an unjust devaluation (illegal theft, immoral end) to black life.
Successful colonies thus can be characterized by an active infiltration by people who settle in with persistent integration to displace and deprive control; anyone they find is targeted in order to “gain” (steal) from their acquired assets. Women are raped, children are abused, men are tortured… all the while being told if they say they ask for equality, let alone reparations for loss, they are being greedy and will be murdered (e.g. lynched by the KKK).
It is an act of violent equity misdirection and permanent displacement coupled with active and forced reprogramming to accept severe and perpetual loss of rights as some kind of new norm (e.g. prison or labor camp). Early explorations of selfish corporations for profit gave little or nothing in return for their thefts, whenever they could find a powerful loophole like colonialism that unfairly extracted value from human life.
Removing something colonus, therefore, is unlike removing elements performing routine work along commercial lines. Even if you fire the bad workers, or remove toxic leadership, the effects of deep colonialism are very likely to remain. Instead, removal means to untangle and reverse steps that had created output under an unjust commercially-driven “civilization”; equity has to flow back to places forced to accept they would never be given any realization or control of their own value.
That is why something like de-occupation is comparatively easy. Even redirecting control, or cancelling a deal or a contract, is easy compared to de-colonization.
De-colonization is very hard.
If I must put it in terms of IT, hardware that actively tried to take control of my daily life and integrate into my processes that I have while reducing my control of direction is what we’re talking about. Not just a bad chip that is patched or replaced, it is an entire business process attack that requires deep rethinking of how gains/losses are calculated.
It would be like someone infecting our storage devices with bitcoin mining code or artificial intelligence (i.e. chatbot, personal assistant) that not only drive profits but also are used to permanently settle in our environment and prevent us from having a final say about our own destiny. It’s a form of blackmail, of having your own digital life ransomed to you.
Reformulating business processes is very messy, and far worse than fixing bugs.
My study in undergraduate and graduate school really tried to make sense of the end of colonialism and the role of foreign influence in national liberation movements through the 1960s.
This was not a study of available patching mechanisms or finding a new source of materials. I never found, not even in the extensive work of European philosophers, a simple way to describe the very many facets of danger from always uninvited (or even sometimes invited) selfish guests who were able to invade and then completely run large complex organizations. Once inside, once infiltrated, the system has to reject the thing it somehow became convinced it chose to be its leader.
Perhaps now you can see the trouble with colonialism definitions.
Now take a look at this odd paraphrase of the Oxford Dictionary (presumably because the author is from the UK), used to setup the blog post called “The dawn of Cyber-Colonialism“:
The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country’s cyber-space, occupying it with technologies or components serving foreign interests, and exploiting it economically.
Pardon my French but this is complete bullshit. Such a definition at face value is far too broad to be useful. Partial control over another country by occupying it with stuff to serve foreign interest and exploiting it sounds like what most would call imperialism at worst, commerce at best. I mean nothing in that definition says “another country” is harmed. Harm seems essential. Subjugation is harmful. That definition also doesn’t say anything about being opposed to control or occupation, let alone exploitation.
I’m not going to blow apart the definition bit-by-bit as much as I am tempted. It fails across multiple levels and I would love to destroy each.
Instead I will just point out that such a horrible definition would result in Ethiopia having to say it was colonized because of British 1940 intervention to remove Axis invaders and put Haile Selassie back into power. Simple test. That definition fails.
Let me cut right to the chase. As I mentioned at the start, those arguing that we are entering an era of cyber-colonialism should think carefully whether they really want to wade into the mess of defining colonialism. I advise everyone to steer clear and choose other pejorative and scary language to make a point.
Actually, I encourage them to tell us how and why technology commerce is bad in precise technical details. It seems lazy for people to build false connections and use association games to create negative feeling and resentment instead of being detailed and transparent in their research and writing.
On that note, I also want to comment on some of the technical points found in the blog claiming to see a dawn of colonialism:
What is truly at stake is whether a small number of technologically-advanced countries, including the US and the UK, but also others with a domestic technology industry, should be in a position to absolutely dominate the “cyber-space” of smaller nations.
I agree in general there is a concern with dominance, but this representation is far too simplistic. It assumes the playing field is made up of countries (presumably UK is mentioned because the blog author is from the UK), rather than what really is a mix of many associations, groups and power brokers. Google, for example, was famous in 2011 for boasting it had no need for any government to exist anymore. This widely discussed power hubris directly contradicts any thesis that subjugation or domination come purely from the state apparatus.
Consider a small number of technologically-advanced companies. Google and Amazon are in a position to absolutely dominate the cyber-space of smaller nations. This would seem as legitimate a concern as past imperialist actions. We could see the term “Banana Republic” replaced as countries become a “Search Republic”.
It’s a relationship fairly easy to contemplate because we already see evidence of it. Google’s chairman told the press he was proud of “Search Republic” policies and completely self-interested commerce (the kind Mill warned about in 1861): he said “It’s called capitalism”
Given the mounting evidence of commercial and political threat to nations from Google, what does cyber-colonialism really look like in the near, or even far-off, future?
Back to the blog claiming to see a dawn of colonialism, here’s a contentious prediction of what cyber-colonialism will look like:
If the manager decides to go with modern internationally sourced computerized system, it is impossible to guarantee that they will operate against the will of the source nation. The manufactured low security standards (or deliberate back doors) pretty much guarantee that the signaling system will be susceptible to hacking, ultimately placing it under the control of technologically advanced nations. In brief, this choice is equivalent to surrendering the control of this critical infrastructure, on which both the economic well-being of the nation and its military capacity relies, to foreign power(s).
The blog author, George Danezis, apparently has no experience with managing risk in critical infrastructure or with auditing critical infrastructure operations so I’ll try to put this in a more tangible and real context:
Recently on a job in Alaska I was riding a state-of-the art train. It had enough power in one engine to run an entire American city. Perhaps I will post photos here, because the conductor opened the control panels and let me see all of the great improvements in rail technology.
The reason he could let me in and show me everything was because the entire critical infrastructure was shutdown. I was told this happened often. As the central switching system had a glitch, which was more often than you might imagine, all the trains everywhere were stopped. After touring the engine, I stepped off the train and up into a diesel truck driven by a rail mechanic. His beard was as long as a summer day in Anchorage and he assured me trains have to be stopped due to computer failure all the time.
I was driven back to my hotel because no trains would run again until the next day. No trains. In all of Alaska. America. So while we opine about colonial exploitation of trains, let’s talk about real reliability issues today and how chips with backdoors really stack up. Someone sitting at the keyboard can worry about resilience of modern chips all they want but it needs to be linked to experience with “modern internationally sourced computerized system” used to run critical infrastructure. I have audited critical infrastructure environments since 1997 and let me tell you they have a very unique and particular risk management model that would probably surprise most people on the outside.
Risk is something rarely understood from an outside perspective unless time is taken to explore actual faults in a big picture environments and the study of actual events happening now and in the past. In other words you can’t do a very good job auditing without spending time doing the audit, on the inside.
A manager going with a modern internationally sourced computerized system is (a) subject to a wide spectrum of factors of great significance (e.g. dust, profit, heat, water, parts availability, supply chains), and (b) worried about presence of backdoors for the opposite reason you might think ; they represent hope for support and help during critical failures. I’ll say it again, they WANT backdoors.
It reminds me of a major backdoor into a huge international technology company’s flagship product. The door suggested potential for access to sensitive information. I found it, I reported it. Instead of alarm by this company I was repeatedly assured I had stumbled upon a “service” highly desirable to customers who did not have the resources or want to troubleshoot critical failures. I couldn’t believe it. But as the saying goes: one person’s bug is another person’s feature.
To make this absolutely clear, there is a book called “Back Door Java” by Newberry that I highly recommend people read if they think computer chips might be riddled with backdoors. It details how the culture of Indonesia celebrates the backdoor as an integral element of progress and resilience in daily lives.
Cooking and gossip are done through a network of access to everyone’s kitchen, in the back of a house, connected by alley. Service is done through back, not front, paths of shared interests.
This is not that peculiar when you think about American businesses that hide critical services in alleys and loading docks away from their main entrances. A hotel guest in America might say they don’t want any backdoors until they realize they won’t be getting clean sheets or even soap and toilet-paper. The backdoor is not inherently evil and may actually be essential. The question is whether abuse can be detected or prevented.
Dominance and control is quite complex when you really look at the relationships of groups and individuals engaged in access paths that are overt and covert.
So back to the paragraph we started with, I would say a manager is not surrendering control in the way some might think when access is granted, even if access is greater than what was initially negotiated or openly/outwardly recognized.
Not opting for computerized technologies is also a difficult choice to make, akin to not having a mobile phone in the 21st century. First, it is increasingly difficult to source older hardware, and the low demand increases its cost. Without computers and modern network communications is it also impossible to benefit from their productivity benefits. This in turn reduces the competitiveness of the small nation infrastructure in an international market; freight and passengers are likely to choose other means of transport, and shareholders will disinvest. The financial times will write about “low productivity of labor” and a few years down the line a new manager will be appointed to select option 1, against a backdrop of an IMF rescue package.
That paragraph has an obvious false choice fallacy. The opposite of granting access (prior paragraph) would be not granting access. Instead we’re being asked in this paragraph to believe the only other choice is lack of technology.
Does anyone believe it increasingly is difficult to source older hardware? We are given no reason. I’ll give you two reasons how old hardware could be increasingly easy to source: reduced friction and increased privacy.
About 20% of people keep their old device because it’s easier than selling it. Another 20% keep their device because privacy concerns. That’s 40% of old hardware sitting and ready to be used, if only we could erase the data securely and make it easy to exchange for money. SellCell.com (trying to solve one of the problems) claims the source of older cellphone hardware in America alone now is about $47billion worth.
And who believes that low demand increases cost? What kind of economic theory is this?
Scarcity increases cost, but we do not have evidence of scarcity. We have the opposite. For example, there is no demand for the box of Blackberry phones sitting on my desk.
Are you willing to pay me more for a Blackberry because low demand?
Even more suspect is a statement that without computers and modern network communications it is impossible for a country to benefit. Having given us a false choice fallacy (either have the latest technology or nothing at all) everyone in the world who doesn’t buy technology is doomed to fail and devalue their economy?
Apply this to ANY environment and it should be abundantly clear why this is not the way the world works. New technology is embraced slowly, cautiously (relative terms) versus known good technology that has proven itself useful. Technology is bought over time with varying degrees of being “advanced”.
To further complicate the choice, some supply chains have a really long tail due to the nature of a device achieving a timeless status and generating localized innovation with endless supplies (e.g. the infamous AK-47, classic cars).
To make this point clearer, just tour the effects of telecommunications providers in countries like South Africa, Brazil, India, Mexico, Kenya and Pakistan. I’ve written about this before on many levels and visited some of them.
I would not say it is the latest or greatest tech, but tech available, which builds economies by enabling disenfranchised groups to create commerce and increase wealth. When a customer tells me they can only get 28.8K modem speeds I do not laugh at them or pity them. I look for solutions that integrate with slow links for incremental gains in resilience, transparency and privacy. When I’m told 250ms latency is a norm it’s the same thing, I’m building solutions to integrate and provide incremental gains. It’s never all-or-nothing.
A micro-loan robot in India that goes into rough neighborhoods to dispense cash, for example, is a new concept based on relatively simple supplies that has a dramatic impact. Groups in a Kenyan village share a single cell-phone and manage it similarly to the old British phone booth. There are so many more examples, none of which break down in simple terms of the amazing US government versus technologically-poor countries left vulnerable.
And back to the blog paragraph we started with, my guess is the Financial Times will write about “productivity of labor” if we focus on real risk, and a few years down the line new managers will be emerging in more places than ever.
Maintaining the ability of western signals intelligence agencies to perform foreign pervasive surveillance, requires total control over other nations’ technology, not just the content of their communication. This is the context of the rise of design backdoors, hardware trojans, and tailored access operations.
I don’t know why we should believe anything in this paragraph. Total control of technology is not necessary to maintain the ability of intelligence. That defies common sense. Total control is not necessary to have intelligence be highly effective, nor does it mean intelligence will be better than having partial or incomplete control (as explained best by David Hume).
My guess is that paragraph was written with those terms because they have a particular ring to them, meant to evoke a reaction rather than explain a reality or demonstrate proof.
Total control sounds bad. Foreign pervasive surveillance sounds bad. Design backdoors, Trojan horses and tailored access (opposite of total control) sound bad. It all sounds so scary and bad, we should worry about them.
But back to the point, even if we worry because such scary words are being thrown at us about how technology may be tangled into a web of international commerce and political purpose, nothing in that blog on “cyber-colonialism” really comes even close to qualify as colonialism.
The best untold story of the last decade may be the story of Africa. Real income has increased more than 30 percent, reversing two decades of decline. Seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are in Africa, and GDP is expected to rise 6 percent per year in the next decade. HIV infections are down nearly 40 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and malaria deaths among children have declined 50 percent . Child mortality rates are falling, and life expectancy is increasing.
Reading between the lines Kerry seems to be watching America lose influence at a time when it should be pulled in by the Africans. He is advising Americans to start thinking of Africa in broader terms of partnership rather than just a place to impose pentagon-led “protective” objectives (e.g. stability for corporate margins, access to infrastructure projects for intel to chase and find our enemies, humanitarian assistance to verify our intel access to infrastructure is working).
A shift from pentagon objectives to state department ones, unless I’m being naive there still exists a significant difference, sounds like a good idea. Kerry does not back away from highlighting past American efforts as he moves towards imposing an American view of how to measure success:
The U.S. government has invested billions of dollars in health care, leading to real progress in combating AIDS and malaria. Our security forces work with their African counterparts to fight extremism. U.S. companies are investing in Africa through trade preferences under the African Growth and Opportunity Act. As a friend, the United States has a role to play in helping Africans build a better future.
Many of the choices are crystal clear. African leaders need to set aside sectarian and religious differences in favor of inclusiveness, acknowledge and advocate for the rights of women and minorities, and they must accept that sexual orientation is a private matter. They must also build on their economic progress by eliminating graft and opening markets to free trade.
I am not sure these two things are compatible if Africa is looking to find the best partner for decisions ahead. To put it another way, has America proven itself a help or a hindrance for the past decade with humanitarian issues? How does it advocate for rights of women and minorities yet send drones with a high civilian casualty rate? The fundamental question of how to reconcile offers of assistance with foreign strings and caveats seems underplayed.
My experience in Africa is the Chinese and Saudis push much more aggressive assistance programs with tangible results, everywhere from power plants and water supplies to schools and hospitals, without overt pressure on values alignment. Whereas a Saudi hospital might require women to cover their skin, which seems to America a horrible insult to women, Africans treat this a minor and perhaps even amusing imposition to disobey. Meanwhile an American hospital where anonymity is impossible and patients are said to be removed without warning and “disappeared”…creates an environment of resistance.
Allow me to relate a simple example of how the US might be able to both provide assistance while also find values alignment:
Global efforts to help malaria in Africa are less likely to fail because of the complicated nature of the disease and rather because of fraud. Kerry calls it graft. In Africa there is an unbelievable amount of graft tied directly to humanitarian efforts and I doubt there is anyone in the world who would say fraud is necessary or good.
I have run the stats given to me by leaders of humanitarian projects and I even have toured some developments on the ground. Conclusions to me seem rather obvious. Since 1989 my studies of humanitarian/ethical intervention in Africa, particularly the Horn, have looked into reasons for failure and one universal truth stands out. Graft shows up as a core issue blocking global efforts to help Africa yet I’m not sure anyone who isn’t looking for it already really notices. Here’s a typical story that tends to have no legs:
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has suspended funding for two malaria grants in Mali and terminated a third for tuberculosis (TB) after finding evidence that $4 million has been embezzled, the organisation said on Tuesday.
Grants to Mali and four other countries — Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Mauritania and Papua New Guinea — have been put under closer scrutiny with tighter restrictions on cash movements.
[…]
The suspensions in Mali concern a $14.8 million malaria grant to buy and distribute insecticide-treated nets for pregnant women and young children; a $3.3 million grant for anti-malaria drugs; and a $4.5 million TB grant targeted at treating prisoners, people in mining communities and patients with multidrug resistant strains of TB among others.
Please verify and see for yourself. Seek answers why assistance declines in areas most in need or is rejected despite demand increasing. Disease can not be eradicated if we back away when economic friction heats up. You may find, as I did, that projects stall when we can not detect supply chain threats, report vulnerabilities and enforce controls.
On the flip side of this issue, imposing a solution from top-down or outside only exacerbates the problem. Nobody wants an outsider to come in and accuse insiders of fraud if there exists any internal methods. Outside pressure can shut down the relationship entirely and block all access, as well as undermine internal footholds, which is why you rarely find diplomats and humanitarian project leaders touching on this issue.
I have proposed technical solutions to solve some of these supply chain issues blocking Africa’s “rise” although I doubt anyone is in a rush to implement them because politically the problem has been allowed to trundle along undefined. I am glad Kerry mentioned it as a footnote on America’s plan as it needs to be picked up as more of a headline. It would be great to see “America helps Senegal reduce fraud in fight to eradicate disease” for example. Until someone like Bill Gates says the problem we must overcome is weak systems that allow graft, we could just keep pumping assistance and yet see no gain or even see reversals. In fact Africa could distance itself from America if our aid goes misdirected while we attempt to impose our broader set of values on those who are not receiving any benefits.
American leaders now may want to help Africa rise and they have to find ways to operate in a market that feels more like a level playing field. We need to step in more as peers in a football match, rather than flood the field with referees, showing how we have solved similar problems while empowering local groups to solve them in ways that may be unfamiliar to us. Once we’re following a similar set of rules with a clear opponents like fraud and malaria, we need to find ways to pass the ball and score as a team. Could Kerry next be talking about delivering solutions integrated with African values rather than pushing distinctly American ones as preconditions?
IT is a perfect fit here because it can support peer-based coalitions of authorities to operate on infrastructure without outside controls. Imagine a network of nodes emerging in Africa the same way the Internet first evolved in America, but with modern technology that is energy efficient, mobile and wireless.
A system to detect, report and block graft on a locally derived scale instead of promoting a centralized top-down monitoring system seems unlikely to happen. Yet that could be exactly what will make America a real partner to Africa’s rise. It begs the question whether anyone has positioned to deliver NFC infrastructure for nets and vaccines while also agreeing to step back, giving shared authority and responsibility to track progress with loose federation. America could be quite a help, yet also faces quite a challenge. Will Kerry find a way for Africans to follow a path forged by America in ways he may not be able to control?
It was during the 1920s — the second rise of KKK after Civil War ended — when all anti-tipping laws were repealed in America to make way for white supremacists to promote it as somehow better for someone. Why was the KKK campaigning to legalize tipping?
A labor review of December 1937 asks a very poignant question about why upwardly mobile blacks in Washington (1909), DC (1910), Mississippi (1912), Arkansas (1913) Iowa, South Carolina and Tennessee (1915) as well as several other states would pass anti-tipping laws only to find them repealed a few years later:
In view of the fact that the anti-tipping sentiment was still strong in the early and middle twenties, one may wonder why the anti-tipping laws were repealed.
When they say anti-tipping sentiment was strong, consider that unionized waiters of New York went on strike in 1906 to refuse tips and demand a minimum wage increase from $2.00/day to $2.50.Source: 1909 Street’s Pandex of the News, p. 316
It would seem the unions were not ordering strikes for higher tips, only for higher wages.
I should probably make a special note here that when Washington DC banned tips in 1910, basically everyone affected was African American. It clearly was about race and livable wages.
What changed in the early 1920s? The KKK returned.
Indeed, this is like asking why the south went to war to preserve slavery in view of the fact that anti-slavery sentiment was strong.
Or perhaps it would be like asking why the KKK pushed so hard for prohibition (encoded criminalization of non-whites) in view of the fact that anti-prohibition (emancipated slaves distilling bourbon) sentiment was still strong.
In other words, anti-tipping laws started in 1909 before the KKK was restarted and all were repealed after. The KKK quickly grew to millions of members under Woodrow Wilson’s administration (1912-1921) and restoring tipping culture was top on their agenda.
One almost could make the argument that anti-tipping laws were a symptom of the changes in America that really inflamed “white insecurity” fears. The late 1890s racist political campaigns took on new urgency to remove anything that could give black Americans fair wages (Update in 2020: “Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy“).
You could say tipping is how racist Americans who lost their Civil War managed to instead legalize their persistent “only white men rule” aims for aristocratic-like power over the now-emancipated black servant class in America.
The abrupt end of slavery in America meant white supremacists shifted tactics to find ways to deny livable wages to non-whites. They also sought to under-fund or block taxation to reduce the social services (education, healthcare) for those they had just denied a livable wage. NPR brings forward several examples of sentiment from the early 1900s after Civil War ended:
…journalist John Speed writing in 1902 said “Negroes take tips, of course, one expects that of them – it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white man was embarrassing to me.” Such was the furor surrounding tipping that, in 1907, Sen. Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina – a virulent segregationist whose bronze statue stands outside the statehouse in Columbia – actually made national headlines for tipping a black porter at an Omaha hotel. The porter, well aware of Tillman’s previous boast that he never “tips a nigger,” told reporters sardonically that he would have the quarter made into a watch charm. “Tillman gives Negro a Tip,” was The New York Times’ headline, under which ran a sympathetic editorial on how travelers were forced “to convert themselves into fountains playing quarters upon the circumambient Africans.”
Thus it was two basic economic tactics meant to undermine black prosperity in America that became the foundation of America’s racist and hateful tipping culture. And the KKK was so successful the practice survives to this day.
Brazil maintained slavery even longer than America. It even convinced American Civil War losers to immigrate so they could continue slavery overtly instead of tipping.
That’s the short version of history. Now for the long form…
Some in America saw the dangers of tipping early and worked to shut-down such anti-democratic culture, arguing correctly it violated core American values. There were numerous anti-tipping laws in the early 1900s. Here you can see some of the views of tipping in America at that time:
“Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities”, by Kerry Segrave, p. 6
The KKK was reborn in 1915, however, and had massive impact on American culture pushing things like the racist prohibition laws (1920 to 1933). No surprise then, by 1926 the white supremacist lobby had repealed anti-tipping laws.
“The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America”, by William R. Scott, 1916
This clear analysis of American “tipping” is confirmed by a Paris Food History blog recollection of where and why tipping culture was invented…French aristocracy and corruption:
These are all examples of an aristocrat giving a gratification to various workers […] It is unlikely on the other hand that diners in taverns and the cheaper cabarets gave tips. This was an obligation for aristocrats – or, probably, those who wanted to emulate them. And it even extended to those in the prison which most often held them: the Bastille. […] Everywhere you eat, submit without a murmur to the tax of the tip. It is illogical, absurd, exorbitant, vexatious […] In 1856, August Luchet described the tronc in which all tips were gathered: “a cylindrical metal safe, split on top.” He also wrote that (not unexpectedly) distribution of the collected tips was not always to the advantage of the servers; some owners found various pretexts for redirecting or appropriating some portion of the funds.
New York, arguably modeled on Paris at its hey-day, has now become the epitome of the “aristocrats in a prison” culture as described above.
…tips are not niceties: give a “thank you” that isn’t green and foldable and you are actively starving someone’s children. This is not only demeaning for everyone; it also makes you feel, basically, that you are being constantly taken…
She’s not wrong. The economics of tipping look to be a disaster for everyone involved. The Economic Policy Institute explains that poverty rates of tipped workers is nearly double other workers and three times more likely to be on food stamps:
Tipped workers — whose wages typically fall in the bottom quartile of all U.S. wage earners, even after accounting for tips — are a growing portion of the U.S. workforce. Employment in the full-service restaurant industry has grown over 85 percent since 1990, while overall private-sector employment grew by only 24 percent. In fact, today more than one in 10 U.S. workers is employed in the leisure and hospitality sector, making labor policies for these industries all the more central to defining typical American work life.
In other words, by tipping, you are pushing less money into a tax pool while at the same time driving the person tipped to need more tax-funded assistance. It’s quite literally a means for aristocrats to appear good in a fleeting personal moment, while actually keeping poor workers in a place they can’t escape.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone. For ten years already we’ve had quantitative data to support what all these arguments above are saying.
The data at this point shows that tipping has become the norm in America as a legalized method to keep non-whites poor in an anti-democratic push for white nationalist aristocracy, and it doesn’t really serve any other purpose.
…98 percent of [21 million Americans eating out] leave a voluntary sum of money (or tip) for the servers who waited on them. These tips, which amount to over $20 billion a year, are an important source of income for the nations’ two million waiters and waitresses. In fact, tips often represent 100 percent of servers’ takehome pay because tax withholding eats-up all of their hourly wages. The income implications of tipping make it a major concern…weak service-tipping relationship, I argued, raises serious questions about the use of tips as a measure of server performance or customer satisfaction as well as the use of tips as incentives to deliver good service….weak relationship between tips and service quality at this level of analysis undermines the use of tips as a measure of customer satisfaction and an incentive to deliver good service.
Empirical evidence suggests that tips are hardly affected by service quality…people derive benefits from tipping including impressing others and improving their selfimage as being generous and kind…. Whether the social norm of tipping increases social welfare depends crucially on the question whether tipping increases service quality. Although service quality is generally high, which could lead us to think that tipping is the incentive that causes waiters to provide excellent service, the analysis above shows that the sensitivity of tips to service quality is so small that tipping is not likely to be the reason for the high service quality. Consequently, tipping, at least in restaurants, does not seem to improve social welfare and economic efficiency by improving service quality
Again, just to be clear we’ve seen for over a decade studies have repeatedly proven “tipping was not significantly related to servers’ or third-parties’ evaluations of the service.”
Tipping really should be treated as an insult and disrespect, when you think about what’s going on.
I remember one night on a work trip in Copenhagen I asked a waitress if I could leave a tip and she angrily replied:
I am paid a reasonable salary for my work and I am good at it. I go to school for free and get healthcare for free. This isn’t your corrupt greed-driven American system. Tips are rude.
She was right. I was caught out for being so… American, unintentionally imposing slavery culture.
There’s no actual link for tipping to better service when you look at the data so my tip in her country made no sense because they have no aristocratic aspirations or need to perpetuate an economic disparity. She wasn’t desperate for an aristocrat to keep her afloat. Since she and I were in a balanced professional engagement, an amount already was settled and handing her a few bills was an insulting gesture.
Taking pride in your work and doing a good job don’t actually come from tips, as restaurateurs explain themselves.
In any workplace, everyone is required to perform well, and tips have nothing to do with it.
We see scientists report that tipping in America is racist by design, perpetuating the aristocratic aspirations of pre-Civil War Americans, and does exactly what the KKK had hoped it would.
The data show very clearly that African Americans receive less in tips than whites, and so there is a legal argument to be made that as a protected class, African American servers are getting less for doing the same work. And therefore, the institution of tipping is inherently unfair.
It is inherently unfair because that is what it was always intended to be, if you accept the argument that it was a loophole for perpetuation of white nationalist policy.
What tips have to do with is a Civil War started by white aristocrats to perpetuate and expand human slavery. Despite losing that war, white supremacists have found numerous ways to maintain programs designed to disadvantage non-whites. That is how American tipping is rooted in slavery and should be abolished.
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