Category Archives: Energy

Energy, History, Security

US Wants to Help Africa on the Rise

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I am happy to see Secretary of State, John Kerry, saying in the Washington Post that America needs to help Africa with difficult decisions that lie ahead:

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?

Energy, Food, Security

Mining and Visualizing YouTube Metadata for Threat Models

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For several years I’ve been working on ways to pull metadata from online video viewers into threat models. In terms of early-warning systems or general trends, metadata may be a useful input on what people are learning and thinking about.

Here’s a recent example of a relationship model between viewers that I just noticed:

A 3D map (from a company so clever they have managed to present software advertisements as legitimate TED talks) indicates that self-reporting young viewers care more about sewage and energy than they care about food or recycling.

The graph also suggests video viewers who self-identify as women watch videos on food rather than energy and sewage. Put young viewers and women viewers together and you have a viewing group that cares very little about energy technology.

I recommend you watch the video. However, I ask that you please first setup an account with false gender to poison their data. No don’t do that. Yes, do…no don’t.

Actually what the TED talk reveals, if you will allow me to get meta for a minute, is that TED talks often are about a narrow band of topics despite claiming to host a variety of presenters. Agenda? There seem to be extremely few outliers or innovative subjects, according to the visualization. Perhaps this is a result of how the visual was created — categories of talks were a little too broad. For example, if you present a TED talk on password management and sharks and I present on reversing hardware and sharks, that’s both just interest in nature, right?

The visualization obscures many of the assumptions made by those who painted it. And because it is a TED talk we give up 7 minutes of our lives yet never get details below the surface. Nonetheless, this type of analysis and visualization is where we all are going. Below is an example from one of my past presentations, where I discussed capturing and showing high-level video metadata on attack types and specific vulnerabilities/tools. If you are not doing it already, you may want to think about this type of input when discussing threat models.

Here I show the highest concentrations of people in the world who are watching video tutorials on how to use SQL injection:

Energy, Security

How Google Will Destroy Stoplights

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I attended a strange meetup the other night. It is one of the amazing benefits of being in San Francisco. You can go in person to meet people on the cutting edge of technology and hear their vision (pun not intended) of the future. In this case I met someone from ski.org who was game for discussing my theories about the future focus being differently-abled, from Google maps to automated cars.

Unfortunately I lack time to blog in full our discussion. In brief, here’s some of what I’ve been speaking on lately, building upon my earlier posts, and what will be in my new book on Big Data security:

Stoplights are a stop-gap (pun not intended) measure that resulted from the inferiority of high-speed automobiles to anticipate danger. We used to be able to keep flow when traveling under 15mph. Adding a speed differential made stop-lights necessary to protect pedestrians and horses from cars, let alone protect cars from other cars; and it was a concept poorly interpreted from sailing.

We should get rid of them. But how do we do that? Automation. Once cars can anticipate other cars at speed, we don’t need to stop and sit at red lights. We’re smarter than the lights, but we can’t see risk fast enough at high speed to get rid of them. Automation can “see” faster.

Similarly, we should stop looking at maps. Look at race cars for the face of innovation. Rally cars do not have visual displays of directions, they have audio navigation. That’s what we should look towards. All we need to do is improve the confirmation or validation of automated navigation devices. Get rid of unnecessary information (e.g. no street-view, no satellite view until the last mile) and allow two-way dialog. Let’s not get stuck on big screens for navigation any more than we were stuck on stop-lights for predicting risk.

Google is leading the world in these areas, especially with Kurzweil on board, so I’m hopeful we can move towards eliminating the wasteful and poorly-thought out stop-light model.

Energy, Security

Red Means Go, Green Means Slow

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While riding in late night taxis in Brazil I noticed they hit the accelerator through red lights. When we approached a green light, they would slow down and look around for people running the reds.

I had to ask why. The drivers said this is a risk mitigation strategy.

Because of assault danger, Brazilian drive through red traffic lights during night, just as a warning.

Since stopping at a red light, especially late at night, makes you an easy victim for car-jacking or robbery…we didn’t stop.

And because everyone there knows drivers run red lights to stay safe, drivers with green lights slow down before crossing an intersection.

Just another example of why we should seriously reconsider stop-lights and their overall impact to risk (inefficiency of idling, yellow-light behavior, etc.)