There’s no ideological struggle between Russia and the West. But there are economic links, freedom of movement, communication and a cultural convergence. So I’m convinced that a new Cold war can be avoided.
His advice is to stop building walls if we want better global and national security.
He might know a thing or two about this given historians still credit him with tearing down the Berlin Wall, although some frame it as him being right about how to avoid being wrong:
He believed liberalism was consistent with Communism, but he was wrong. The forces of democracy he unleashed toppled the Wall, and it is because of him this occurred without bloodshed.
In October 1918, just a year after black Australian men gallantly charged their horses into Beersheba, the UK army (e.g. Egypt Expeditionary Force or EEF) occupied all of Palestine, Syria, Southern Turkey and Iraq. The Sydney Morning Herald describes how information warfare tactics had played a significant role in this theater of WWI:
Britain’s new commander-in-chief, General Sir Edmund Allenby, had arranged for fake battle plans to be lost from a saddlebag falling off a horse near the Turkish front line that claimed he was going to pretend to attack Beersheba from the south while in reality he would be attacking Gaza harder than ever. The Turks fell for it.
So it was fake battle plans in a saddle bag dropped intentionally close to Turkish forces that marked the beginning of a collapse of Ottoman control over the region. However the truly remarkable action is documented by the Australian War Memorial, which gives a detailed first-person account: an October 31st battle in 1917 that enabled Britain to drive towards dominant control over Palestine:
The final phase of this all day battle was the famous mounted charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade. Commencing at dusk, members of the brigade stormed through the Turkish defences and seized the strategic town of Beersheba. The capture of Beersheba enabled British Empire forces to break the Ottoman line near Gaza on 7 November and advance into Palestine.
Such a charge brought many surprises to opposing forces as the mounted Australians and New Zealanders were innovating as fast as they rode (also known as being under-equipped and sent to their death), turning bayonets into swords as they charged towards Ottoman artillery and machine guns:
Though the ANZAC cavalry had never trained for such an assault, Chauvel ordered his forces to charge the Ottoman forces fortified in trenches. They galloped so fast that the Ottoman marksmen couldn’t adjust their range quickly enough to effectively aim at the advancing cavalry.
“Australia’s first big achievement on the world stage” SMH
The Beersheba victory was even more significant in terms of what had failed to materialize before black Australians arrived on the scene.
In 1916, more than a year earlier than the abrupt cavalry charge through fortified Ottoman trenches, the UK had been in negotiations with King Hussein. The King had expressed desire to bring the entire Arab peninsula, Greater Syria, and Iraq under his and his descendants’ rule, in exchange for support of the British war effort.
Sir Henry McMahon then conveyed to Hussein that the British government would be willing to recognize such an establishment of an Arab independent nation in exchange for an uprising that obviated the need for invasion. McMahon offered an area more limited than what Hussein had been claiming as his to rule.
That series of negotiations in 1916 led to a plan for an Arab revolution (e.g. the Anglo-Hashemite operation), which was in fact initiated June of that year. While Britain financed the revolt with arms, provisions, artillery support, and desert warfare consultants (e.g. the controversial T. E. Lawrence), both the British forces and the Hashemites came up short and delivered very little regional insurrection.
Only small numbers of Syrian and Iraqi nationalists joined an Arab Army (الجيش العربي) under the Sharifan banner meant to unite Arab peoples, while others simply remained loyal to the Ottoman sultan. The British summer of 1917 inquiry into how this insurrection went wrong led to “a large number of Generals…removed by the War Office from their commands in Mesopotamia”.
New leadership shifted from negotiations towards quickly dominating this region, thus by the fall of 1917 the Generals instead were pushing disinformation into front lines and then charging horses straight into Beersheba. Despite Allenby himself saying he was intrigued by T. E. Lawrence’s antics, the planners for the Beersheba campaign were definitely not impressed with the “legend”.
As many of the troopers believed their wonderful horses, aka Walers, had won the day, they were very sad when ordered at war’s end to leave their horses behind. “Rather than sell them to locals who treated their horses badly, many of us decided to shoot them instead,” said trooper Albert Cornish.
That brand of state-sanctioned discrimination by the War Office against Arabs unfortunately is not the only racism in this story.
Beyond the gallant horses being shot to death soon after they rode to victory, many of the men who rode them also were severely mistreated under white supremacist laws of Australia (e.g. 1915 Aborigines Act).
Historians estimate that as many as 1,000 of the approximately 4,500 Australian soldiers who fought here in WWI were Aboriginal, though the exact number is difficult to determine. The cavalry units were especially popular for Aboriginal soldiers since many had experience handling horses at home.
An Australian play in 2014 called Black Diggers tried to tell their stories.
Technically the Australian government under direction from the British had barred anyone not “predominantly” of European descent from enlisting to fight in WWI. The disaster of Galipolli however dropped Australia’s numbers such that it strained racist barriers to entry; by 1916 there’s much evidence of Aboriginal men volunteering and being accepted to fight for freedom, which could be a significant hidden story of why the Battle of Beersheba was won.
…what was, at the time, called the “Halfcaste Military Order” of 1917 allowed some exemptions. “That allowed Aboriginal men with at least one European parent, or people who had lived with white men, to be accepted into the AIF…
Less than a month ago the very first statue was erected to commemorate the significance of Aboriginal horsemen, as reported by Australian media:
Australia’s ambassador to Israel Chris Cannan (left) and Aboriginal Light Horseman Jack Pollard’s grandson Mark Pollard unveil the statue.
Update 18 September 2022: Professor Peter Simkins at the University of Birmingham wrote a book review highly critical of the Beersheba operation (Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East 1917-1919 by Matthew Hughes):
…Allenby’s tactical performance in Palestine was, as Hughes reveals, far from unblemished. For example, at the Third Battle of Gaza, which began at the end of October 1917, Allenby’s acceptance of Chetwode’s frequently-praised plan to use the bulk of the mounted troops to attack the Turkish eastern flank at Beersheba is now deemed to have been a serious mistake. Although the vital wells at Beersheba were captured virtually intact, along with 90.000 gallons of water in Turkish reservoirs, these supplies were still not sufficient to sustain the units involved, leaving Allenby’s cavalry ‘impotent and stranded’ in the arid land between Gaza and Beersheba and therefore negating ‘the whole purpose of the flanking operation’. The lack of mounted troops opposite Gaza itself, where the strength of the Turkish defences was overestimated, in turn prevented rapid exploitation of success in the coastal sector and delayed the highly symbolic occupation of Jerusalem after the artillery of Bulfin’s XXI Corps had created the opportunity for a breakthrough.
This narrative is completely inverted from an intelligence analysis of that time. In other words a full frontal assault against “overestimated” defenses might be something more fitting for the grind of European trench warfare calculations. Hughes takes the reader on a “what if” exercise removed from the actual theater of conflict: “what if” the British had adopted heavy frontal assault tactics from France while Turks and Germans did nothing to repel it (no reserve forces, no reserve trenches)?
The “what if” seems lopsided because it begs whether the British should have had an expectation of no resistance in a third try after two failed frontal assaults that had heavy casualties? Allenby’s style was of exhaustive research and consideration of the options, listening to experts on the ground. It’s unfair hindsight to say the “Somme-like” artillery bombardment laid on Gaza would have left it like a walk in the park for his cavalry. This ignores Gaza twice already had proved what Allenby described shortly after arrival as naturally “protracted defenses”.
It also ignores a rather obvious sign Beersheba was the opposite of a mistake: multiple successful follow-on deception operations in WWII trace to Allenby’s success with a haversack ruse in 1917 to surprise and flank the Ottomans. For example Wavell, today considered the father of British deception in WWII, was a member of Allenby’s staff in WWI and pulled forward the success of Bersheeba into many decisive victories using deception tactics (i.e. Operation Bertram, Compass, Mincemeat).
They wait for hours until late in the evening on the Brooklyn Bridge. (Photo by Anthony Calvacca/New York Post/Photo Archives, LLC)
During research for my new book I often run into artificial intelligence promises of the 1950s that by the 1960s meant tests of the sort of thing people today talk about as new technology.
For example I’ve given several presentations on how driverless cars were promised to be on roads by the mid-1970s, and why such automation dreams for our civilian lives instead fizzled and failed (i.e. fears stemming from the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Another example of this nature is the optical character recognition (OCR) work that by 1966 was considered good enough to read license plates. For some reason I often find people claiming that this was a development in the 1980s, specifically Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR).
Archives easily confirm the 1980s are decades late. I’ve even found some evidence of late 1960s NYPD plans for racist profiling (“wanted car” surveillance) with bridges outfitted with ALPR. Such surveillance seems far more real and sinister than even the infamous New York “Jim Crow bridge story“.
Hearings, Reports and Prints of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Volume 89, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966, p 33
Perhaps New York should consider celebrating their surveillance state history by issuing a commemorative license plate for automated license plate readers? 2016 would have been the 50th anniversary of the kind of research grant that nobody seems to remember.
The $180K grant for New York in 1966 is the equivalent of a $1.4M grant today. It seems to be a significant amount for surveillance technology development and evaluation. Today is a different story, however.
ALPR cost has deflated over the same time, so now anyone can run free OpenALPR themselves on inexpensive hardware.
“Get an alert the moment any license plate is seen by your security cameras. Monitor suspicious activity with simple database searches that reveal the full history of any vehicle that drove past a camera on your property.”
The shift in surveillance market economics was highlighted a couple years ago by an Australian hobbyist with the click-bait headlines: “How I replicated an $86 million [Victoria police] project in 57 lines of code” and “I caught someone with it“.
BlueNet only has to meet a 95% accuracy target. So if $1 million gets you to 80% accuracy, and maybe $10 million gets you to 90% accuracy — when do you stop spending?
The answer appears to be in the question. Spending could stop when you hit that 95% accuracy target, assuming you don’t run into the privacy and ethical problems that have plagued ALPR for 50 years now, such as this extortion case in 1997…
The D.C. police lieutenant in charge of investigating extortion plots was arrested yesterday and charged with carrying out his own extortion plot against men who frequented a gay bar…Stowe used a law enforcement computer system to identify the man and at least two others who visited the club through their automobile license plates.
Los Angeles is considering sending “Dear John” letters to the homes of men who [drive through neighborhoods where prostitutes are alleged to be] hoping the mail will be opened by mothers, girlfriends or wives.
Regulation and targeted response strategies to fight disinformation worked after FDR took office in 1932, and it’s likely to work again today when someone will muster the national trust of residents ready to take action.
Without that kind of popular support, and by instead making conciliation to technology companies, it’s unlikely we’ll see any progress today.
DefenseOne writes there’s been a necessary shift in security from a focus entirely on confidentiality towards more integrity. They then propose three steps to get there.
First is better, faster understanding by the U.S. government of what disinformation American adversaries are spreading—or, ideally, anticipation of that spread before it actually happens. […]
Second is, in appropriate circumstances, the swift, clear, and direct intervention of U.S. government spokespersons to expose falsities and provide the truth. […]
Third is an expanded set of U.S. government partnerships with technologies companies to help them identify disinformation poised to spread across their platforms so that they can craft appropriate responses.
What this article misses entirely is what has worked in the past. Unless they address why that wouldn’t work today, I’m skeptical of their suggestions to try something new and untested.
Point one sounds like a call for more surveillance, which will obviously run into massive resistance before it even gets off the ground. So there’s a tactical and political headwind. Points two and three are unlikely to work at all.
The most effective government spokesperson in past typically was the President. That’s not possible today for obvious reasons. In the past the partnerships with technology companies (radio, newspaper) wasn’t possible, and it’s similarly not possible today. Facebook’s CEO has repeatedly said he will continue to push disinformation for profit.
I’ve been openly writing and presenting on this modern topic since 2012 (e.g. BSidesLV presentation on using data integrity attacks on mobile devices to foment political coups), with research going back to my undergraduate and graduate degrees in the mid-1990s.
What worked in the past? Look at the timeline after the 1932 Presidential election to 1940, which directly addressed Nazi military disinformation campaigns (e.g. America First) promoting fascism.
Breakup of the organizations disseminating disinformation (regulation).
Election of a President that can speak truth to power, who aligns a government with values that block attempts to profit on disinformation/harms (regulation).
Rapid dissemination of antidotes domestically, and active response abroad with strong countermeasures.
Roosevelt defeats Nazis at the ballot box: “By 1932, Hearst was publishing articles by Adolf Hitler, whom Hearst admired for keeping Germany out of, as Hitler put it in a Hearst paper, “the beckoning arms of Bolshevism.” Hitler instead promoted a transcendent idea of nationalism—putting Germany first—and, by organizing devoted nationalist followers to threaten and beat up leftists, Hitler would soon destroy class-based politics in his country. Increasingly, Hearst wanted to see something similar happen in the United States.”
The question today thus should be not about cooperating with those who have been poisoning the waters. The question should be whether regulation is possible in an environment of get-rich-quick fake-it-til-you-make-it greedy anti-regulatory values.
Take Flint, Michigan water disaster as an example, let alone Facebook/Google/YouTube/WellsFargo.
After officials repeatedly dismissed claims that Flint’s water was making people sick, residents took action.
America has a history of bottom-up (populist) approaches to governance solving top-down exploitation (It’s the “United” part of USA fighting the King for independence). A bottom-up approach isn’t likely to come from the DefenseOne strategy of partnerships between big government and big technology companies.
In fact, with history as our guide, we can see how President Reagan’s concept of partnership with big technology was to remove protection of American children from predators (promoting “ideological child abuse” for profit), as I explained in my 2018 OWASP talk “Unpoisoned Fruit“.
I’m not saying it will be easy to rotate to populist solutions. It will definitely be hard to take on broad swaths of corrupt powerful leaders who repeatedly profit from poisoning large populations for personal gains.
Yet that’s the obvious fork in our road today, and even outside entities know they can’t thrive if Americans choose to be united again in their take-down of selfish profiteers who now brazenly argue for their right to unregulated harms in vulnerable populations.
If Zuckerberg were CEO of Juul… right now he’d be trying to excite investors by saying ten new fruity tobacco flavors are coming next quarter for freedom-loving children.
The boss of e-cigratte maker Juul stepped down on Wednesday in the face of a regulatory backlash and a surge in mysterious illnesses linked to vaping products.
I wrote in 2012 about the immediate need for regulation of vaping. Seven years later that regulation finally is happening, sadly after dozens have been dying suddenly and without explanation. A partnership with tobacco companies was never on the table.
Bottom line is if you ever wonder why a Republican party today would undermine FCC and CIA authority, look at FDR’s creation of them to understand how and why they were designed to block and tackle foreign fascist military and domestic disinformation campaigns.
As part of its services to the industry, FTI monitored environmental activists online, and in one instance an employee created a fake Facebook persona — an imaginary, middle-aged Texas woman with a dog — to help keep tabs on protesters. Former FTI employees say they studied other online influence campaigns and compiled strategies for affecting public discourse. They helped run a campaign that sought a securities rule change, described as protecting the interests of mom-and-pop investors, that aimed to protect oil and gas companies from shareholder pressure to address climate and other concerns…
Founded in 1982 in Annapolis, Md., as a firm that provided expert witnesses and presentations for litigation, FTI has grown into a multinational firm that employs almost 5,000 people in 28 countries. Its business spans a wide range of services, from business consulting to crisis communications.
‘increased users risk of remote video surveillance by strangers and remained on users’ computers even after they deleted the Zoom app, and would automatically reinstall the Zoom app—without any user action—in certain circumstances,’ the FTC said. The FTC alleged that Zoom’s deployment of the software without adequate notice or user consent violated US law banning unfair and deceptive business practices.
And they basically lied for years and years about security.
…Zoom claimed it offers end-to-end encryption in its June 2016 and July 2017 HIPAA compliance guides… also claimed it offered end-to-end encryption in a January 2019 white paper, in an April 2017 blog post, and in direct responses to inquiries from customers and potential customers… In fact, Zoom did not provide end-to-end encryption for any Zoom Meeting…
I’ve written before about Zoom’s egregious bad-faith business practices here and here.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
