A documentary by BBC4 explores views of risk in terms of cultural clues and imagery. It interviews numerous experts to reveal the origins of The Great Wave off Kanagawa print, and shows how it has represented very different things to different people.
The Japanese viewer apparently sees groups of men set together in harmony with nature to achieve success — possibly a spring-time catch of bonito fish for a hard-working crew returning as quickly as possible to a market. The huge, towering wave is not an image of despair but of power and collective effort. Toshio Watanabe, a Japenese Art Historian, explains:
(1:14/10:04) “It’s depicting, basically, speedboats like DHL or FedEx.” […] (9:14/10:04) This is an image of courage and perseverance because the oarsmen have a job to do. “There are so many rowers because they need speed and they are not worried about the waves at all. They are taking it in great stride.”
Dr. David Peat, a Physicist at the Pari Center in Italy (among several others) suggests a very different effect for a viewer from the West. He sees the Great Wave as a moral lesson for an individual, which centers around mortality, anxiety and a fear of the unknown (based on chaos theory):
(5:40/8:25) It’s telling us something about being on the edge of chaos; something about how we live our lives. We have to have regularity and order. But if we have too much then we become dead. So it’s telling us where life lies. It’s telling us something about ourselves. We have to learn how to live on the edge of chaos.
Although it is easy to split the views and categorize them among Far East and Western views, following the BBC’s narrative, it could be split a different way. Those who live in and around water and on small boats may look at the Great Wave as familiar and controllable; while those who spend all their time on land may look at the wave with fear of the unknown — “surf’s up” versus “run”. Which are you?
The prosperity of cities and countryside of the late 1940s England, France, Italy, etc. benefited significantly from inexpensive and “off-grid” two-wheeled technology — these economies all were rebuilt on bicycles.
When I lived in London in the 1990s and studied post-WWII History, I regularly noticed this kind of footnote (pun not intended) on two-wheeled transportation for much of Europe.
My curiosity in European cycling might have been a bit biased, as I myself rode a bicycle everywhere and everyday (spinning through the dark rainy days along dirty double-decker red buses, black cabs and the anti-terror Ring of steel that obfuscated downtown London).
It wasn’t just a link with history. The math of cycling appealed to me: A car at that time would have taken at least 30 minutes plus parking time for me to go from home to the city. I could ride a bus for 45 minutes plus waiting, take the train for 30 minutes plus waiting, or… I could go door-to-door on a bike in just 20 minutes.
Besides saving money, the time I saved on a bicycle made the choice obvious (I have to admit I did not properly account for the pollution/health costs caused by lax vehicle emission laws).
Despite these simple calculations, I usually found at all times I was the only cyclist on any London roads.
It seemed odd to not see others on bikes especially since London had been through a period of extremely popular two-wheel transportation use in the past that had proved their value.
Take for example this video of the Cyclist Touring Club from Britain, which talks of “rediscovering common humanity” and “getting rid of our enemies” in the 1950s:
Another good example is the light scooter industry of Italy — a result of the war industry. While bicycles were obviously popular, after 1945 the prevalence of metal tubes (frame), wheels, tires and sheet metal manufacturing for Axis war planes was re-purposed into two-wheeled transportation. It all started with the single model motor scooter in 1946 by Piaggio & Co. SpA of Pontedera, Italy
I won’t go into why people moved away from these logical options for transportation and to the illogical gasoline automobile. Kunstler does a good job of that in The Geography of Nowhere. Instead, I want to point out here that the recent tsunami devastation in Japan is showing a sudden uptick in two-wheeled commuters.
Bicycles sold like hotcakes at supermarkets and bike shops after Friday’s megaquake shut down train services in the Tokyo metropolitan area, attracting local residents — and people from farther afield — who wanted to cycle home instead of facing the prospect of walking for several hours.
Disaster planners should not underestimate the importance and resilience of two-wheel transportation (and power generation), especially given recent advances in motorcycle ambulances in Africa that greatly reduce mortality rates.
WWI cycle engineering eerily still seems modern in concept
A bicycle ride to a data center, office or even a hospital might seem ridiculous until you take a good look at these disasters and factor transportation dependencies. The next days and weeks unfortunately will illustrate the automobile infrastructure weakness as well as how gasoline hoarding by automobile owners can negatively impact recovery.
The growth of automobiles always has been based on questionable assumptions about the government’s ability to collect taxes in order to protect and provide smooth highways, right-of-way, and inexpensive fuel. A national disaster puts these assumptions in a very different light. It shifts the economic playing field and puts the automobile back into its more natural disadvantaged state.
The biggest irony of this all, perhaps, is how often I find avowed libertarians driving exactly the kind of inefficient cars that depend heavily on the commonality of infrastructure and centralized services — only after a national disaster do they realize that a gas-guzzling shiny and fragile “success-mobile” is the ultimate sign of their unsustainable yet socialist tendencies.
A harrowing first-person account has been published by BBC journalists who were arrested and tortured in Libya. The role of identities in these conflicts is illuminating. Note for example that one of the three journalists, a Palestinian, receives the harshest treatment. The torturer seems to call out bad relations between Libya and Hamas, as well as a hatred for Al-Jazeera:
“He said something bad about Palestinians, a lot of bad things, and he asked his team what they thought about Palestinians and they said the same things. He thought they had helped the Palestinians a lot, but Hamas has given a very bad reaction to Gaddafi. Lots of bad language.
“When I tried to respond he took me out to the car park behind the guard room. Then he started hitting me without saying anything. First with his fist, then boots, then knees. Then he found a plastic pipe on the ground and beat me with that. Then one of the soldiers gave him a long stick. I’m standing trying to protect myself, I’m trying to tell him we’re working, I’m a Palestinian, I have a good impression of the country. He knew who we were [ie journalists] and what we were doing.
“I think there was something personal against me. They knew me and the sort of coverage I had been doing, especially from Tajoura the Friday before. I think they monitored the BBC and had an idea, not just the reports but also DTLs [interviews from the studio with a correspondent in the field]. They don’t like us or Al-Arabiya or Al-Jazeera.”
While in detention they had access to other prisoners and their stories.
…they had been arrested because their phone calls had been intercepted – including ones to the foreign media…
Then after days of beatings and interrogation by the military, they are sent to intelligence headquarters for review.
We were crammed in worse than sardines. The others were so badly beaten, and it was so full, that every time you moved someone screamed. They had mashed faces, broken ribs. We were handcuffed, really tightly, behind our backs.
The intelligence group changes the situation dramatically. The BBC journalists point out that things are cleaner, and more organized. Their description of their oppressors switches, from the above examples of basic and angry brutality, to something far more sinister.
A man with a small sub-machine gun was putting it to the nape of everyone’s neck in turn. He pointed the barrel at each of us. When he got to me at the end of the line, he pulled the trigger twice. The shots went past my ear.
“They all laughed as though it was very funny. There was a whole group of them in plain clothes.”
At this point a man “who spoke very good English, almost Oxford English” interrogates them and then they are released. Another man tells them “sorry it was a mistake by the military”.
It is hard not to notice the flow of identities in this story from an outsider view; a British man is left unharmed and even finds a commonality when facing Libyan intelligence, while an Arab is despised and brutalized. Differences between people obviously have been the source and focus of great tragedy in history, however differences are very relative. Another awful reality is seen here; the fear of espionage and civil war leads oppressors to treat those who we may see as similar to them far more brutally than those who are far more different. The integrity (papers, please) and confidentiality (networking) of communication in Libya today thus are issues of life and death.
Updated to add: below is a video released today of an American Congressman remembering an American 9/11 first responder who died while trying to help rescue people from the North Tower.
After Mr. Hamdani, 23, disappeared on Sept. 11, ugly rumors circulated: he was a Muslim and worked in a lab; he might have been connected to a terrorist group. Months later the truth came out. Mr. Hamdani’s remains had been found near the north tower, and he had gone there to help people he did not know.
Pick your favorite bogeyman. The latest outsider attack is probably their fault…
My presentation at BSidesSF this year tried to make the argument that attribution is harder than ever online. Attackers make extensive use of proxies and remote control, so it can be very difficult to trace all the points back to an actual person…and even if you do, they may only be one of a thousand mules following instructions. It was gratifying to hear General Alexander at the RSA keynote on February 17th after my presentation admit to his audience “We don’t have situational awareness”.
I could go into the complicated philosophy of why attribution is a double-edged sword (e.g. users on the Internet do not want to sacrifice their privacy) or go into the long history of technical issues with attribution (e.g. smurfing), but instead I just want to point out the two most recent spectacular attribution failures.
First, WordPress suffered a denial of service attack that came from systems in China. I asked my audience at BSidesSF “how many people in the audience use products made in China” and the entire room raised their hand. Granted, there were only three people in the room (jk), but my point is that “it came from China” should be immediately discounted as a strong attribution link. If a weapon found after an attack has “from China” stamped on it, investigators should not jump to the conclusion that the attacker therefore must also be from China. Even worse is to super-impose Chinese state motives onto a suspected Chinese attacker, all because the weapon is “from China”.
WordPress said last week the attacks might have been politically motivated and aimed at an unnamed Chinese-language blog, but it no longer has that view.
“Don’t think it’s politically motivated anymore,” WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg said in an e-mail to IDG News Service. “However the attacks did originate in China.”
Mullenweg did not elaborate on the change in view or offer details on the source of the attacks.
Second, I have a lot of respect for Ralph Langner who has been credited with exposing the details of the Stuxnet attack. When I listened to his recent interview he made points like Stuxnet was very basic because it did not need to be complex and Stuxnet was directed at Natanz, never at Busheir. Why did he say at first it was probably directed at Busheir? In the interview he said it was because he assumed that would be a target of Mossad…in other words, his bias on international politics overshadowed his analysis of the facts. He recently reiterated it was the Mossad.
“My opinion is that the Mossad is involved,” Ralph Langner said while discussing his in-depth Stuxnet analysis at a prestigious TED conference in the Southern California city of Long Beach.
We should not lose sight of the fact that he already has admitted he made one serious mistake because he believed Mossad was to blame before his investigation started. The Mossad certainly has a lot of people spooked, but every suspicious bird and rock is not necessarily their handiwork.
Every piece of dog poop you see, on the other hand, should in fact be attributed to the CIA.
I appreciate Langner’s honest, clear and open style; yet it seems when he switches to geopolitical analysis he overlooks important data points like the significance of Pakistan and German intelligence operations.
Note the recent mass exodus of US special forces and operatives from Pakistan after the arrest of Davis. The US denies he was anything more than a diplomat, but let’s face the fact that a fight with Afghans and Iranians makes Pakistan a really good proxy. The British certainly made this point when they told the CIA under Tenet that Iran was stealing nuclear secrets from Pakistan. Without the Davis incident (he killed two motorcyclists that probably were trying to assassinate him) we would have far less data on how Pakistani operations might be attributed back to American objectives. Instead an exodus of US operatives now is suggested by some to be related to the drop in US drone attacks in Afghanistan (e.g. disruption of intelligence channels); it probably also is impacting other Pakistan-originated operations that could affect Iran (e.g. Stuxnet).
While there is a case to be made that Pakistan has been a proxy to US and Israeli objectives, that is far from achieving attribution. Maybe Britain was acting on its own, with the support of Germany, on behalf of the US. Time will tell and probably reveal a more complicated picture than we might believe today; and that is just for the physical world. Take for example the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953. It served British objectives, but today we know it was an American-led operation masked to look like an insider revolt against nationalism, despite the fact that the prior year Iran’s nationalist movement fit American interests. Attribution of crowd events was hard. Attribution of Internet crowd events is even harder.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
