You may remember Terrorist 007, Exposed from a few months ago. That was an article by Rita Katz.

I was interested in whether the New Yorker article had generated any buzz in the press. The story was picked up yesterday by The Middle East Times, a Cyprus based publisher.

The SITE Institute provides an open listing of its publications, including a summary of each item. As a non-profit, SITE seeks donations. If you give $1,000 or more, she will send you a "free" copy of her book -- a $16 value, absolutely free! About the book, Robert Steele says:

Reliable sources in the counter-terrorism world inform me that this book is partly fiction in that the author is systematically integrating the accomplishments of others into her story as if they were her own. I have, however, decided to leave my review intact because she tells a very good story and its key points are right on target. I recommend the book for purchase by all--on balance it is a fine contribution. As I finished the book, I agreed completely with the author's basic premise, to the effect that open source information about US terrorist and charity ties, properly validated, should be posted to the Internet for all to see.

Here's an early article about the brouhaha over her book. She was also interviewed by National Review.

Islamic terrorism is different from organized crime on several levels and it needs to be confronted accordingly. For terrorists, money is not a goal, but rather a means. Islamic terrorists, unlike other criminals, have no value for life, not even their own. Without understanding their motives and way of thinking, they cannot be defeated. Therefore, Islamic terrorism needs to be studied in depth, and it needs to be addressed as a global, long-term problem. Which brings me to the strategic planning of the war on terror. The only way we can win this war is if we, the West, will force countries, governments, and organizations that educate, preach, and fund jihad to stop what they are doing.

Her relationship with the government has been rocky at times, as she related in her book:

"The CIA was investigating me and the SAAR investigators from Green Quest and Customs. The CIA and the FBI investigated everyone who had anything to do with the SAAR investigation... [ Read More (2.8k in body) ]

Decius wrote:

The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. ... In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect ...

The article explains in no uncertain terms that SITE includes HUMINT.

For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as "wills," the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going. Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days ...

Misrepresentation?

Decius wrote:

I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. ... It's best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV. ... Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of its funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Partly for the sake of brevity, and partly for the sake of argument, my example (over)simplified things by proposing that the operators obtain financial support through an open-source analysis firm. It needn't be that way, or that simple.

You use the term "amateur." I use the term True Believer; to him, there should be no "market." To the extent the market exists anyway, he considers it irrelevant, perhaps even delegitimating. He would generally prefer that there not be a market. His objectives remain pure, that way.

What control does the government really have over the counterterror True Believer? No more than they have over the terrorist, one would think.

Decius wrote:

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime ... Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc[enary] forces is already troubling in this regard.

About the issue of private mercenary forces: would it be legal for a corporation to hire such a firm to conduct counterstrike operations against a non-state entity who simultaneously attacks it in many different jurisdictions? I suspect not. Yet the hodge-podge of an international response that could conceivably be assembled to meet such a threat would likely be neither timely nor unified, and thus equally unlikely to be effective. So what is a transnational corporation to do?

Society and national governments might be able to exert pressure on formally organized "entities" with substantial above-board business operations. The levers of authority s... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

In the 21st century, the "scene" transcends the concepts of individual and organization.

This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions. Only a few are top managers or ever will be. In a system that makes such hazy terminology as "junior executive" psychologically necessary, they are of the staff as much as the line, and most are destined to live poised in a middle area that still awaits a satisfactory euphemism. But they are the dominant members of our society nonetheless. They have not joined together into a recognizable elite--our country does not stand still long enough for that--but it is from their ranks that are coming most of the first and second echelons of our leadership, and it is their values which will set the American temper.

I am going to call it a Social Ethic. With reason it could be called an organization ethic, or a bureaucratic ethic; more than anything else it rationalizes the organization's demands for fealty and gives those who offer it wholeheartedly a sense of dedication in doing so--in extremis, you might say, it converts what would seem in other times a bill of no rights into a restatement of individualism.

But there is a real moral imperative behind it, and whether one inclines to its beliefs or not he must acknowledge that this moral basis, not mere expediency, is the source of its power. Nor is it simply an opiate for those who must work in big organizations. The search for a secular faith that it represents can be found throughout our society--and among those who swear they would never set foot in a corporation or a government bureau. Though it has its greatest applicability to the organization man, its ideological underpinnings have been provided not by the organization man but by intellectuals he knows little of and toward whom, indeed, he tends to be rather suspicious.

Let me now define my terms. By social ethic I mean that contemporary body of thought which makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual. Its major propositions are three: a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in "belongingness" as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness.

An ideal of individualism which denies the obligations of man to others is manifestly impossible in a society such as ours, and it is a credit to our wisdom that while we preached it, we never fully practiced it.... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

The Organization Man, by William Whyte

"They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age.

A hundred years from now, a great writer will produce a Pulitzer Prize winning book about the most significant debates in the intellectual sphere at the turn of the century. Bill Joy will figure in it, although he will end up looking a lot like Louis Agassiz. Francis Fukuyama will be there, too. He will fare better than Joy, but the lesson will be clear: you can change your mind about an idea, but it is considerably more difficult to reposition yourself in the social network. You can alienate former colleagues easily enough, but good luck trying to build support with your former opponents.

Oh, the irony. How naïve we were in the early days.

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Counterterrorism as vocation. True Believers Wanted.

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

It's clear the US government, and much of the international community, seeks to deter, detect, and seize the proceeds of international fundraising for terrorism. But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

If private counterterrorism is deemed terrorism in the eyes of official national governments, how should transnational corporations respond when terrorists begin targeting them directly? To whom do you turn when your infrastructure is simultaneously attacked in 60 countries? Must you appeal to the security council, or wait for all 60 countries (some of whom are not on speaking terms with each other) to agree on an appropriate response? What about when some of those countries are sponsors of the organization perpetrating the attack?

"The problem isn't Rita Katz -- the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

It's the computer security story again. Katz runs a full disclosure mailing list. Privately the Feds are subscribers, even as they complain publicly about training and propriety.

This article probably earns a Silver Star, although it might have been even stronger if it had been a feature in Harper's or The Atlantic, where it could have been twice as long, and could have been less a personal profile and more about the substance and impact of her work.

It's been a year now, and at risk of self-promotion, I'll say it's worth re-reading the Naftali thread.

Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.

Tom has been published in the current issue of CACM. His article is currently number one of only 7 references to Francis Fukuyama in the ACM Digital Library. There is a report about Internet voting, two about trust in electronic commerce, an excerpt from The Social Life of Information, and an article by Grady Booch where the title is a take-off on Fukuyama's classic, The End of History. Tom's article is the only one to reference Fukuyama in the context of science/technology policy and academic freedom.

In crafting policy, is it useful to distinguish between basic knowledge and specific vulnerabilities in a finished product?

Tom's opening line refers to "the free pursuit of knowledge." The implication in Joy's argument, and in Tom's response to it, suggests that it is possible, through policy, to wall off certain areas of knowledge in a selective manner, based on some balanced assessment of risk and reward. Set aside the wisdom of the policy issue; it's not clear to me this is even possible.

So much of what turns out to be disruptive knowledge arrives unexpectedly. This much should be obvious by definition. Yet frequently it seems to be brushed aside. Joy focuses on big, deliberate endeavors; he refers to "efforts" like the Manhattan Project.

Although the history of the Internet is deeply intertwined with defense, it is worth noting that the World Wide Web was not the product of a grand-vision project. Well, actually, it was, but that big project was about physics, not information management. The Web arose from an off-the-books "effort" to organize some documentation.

Recall the recent Freeman Dyson articles that I recommended. The next supervirus is as likely to arrive courtesy of a five year old, playing in the backyard, as from a diabolical terrorist with genocidal tendencies.

Inherent in Tom's premise is the idea that one has the ability to distinguish between knowing and doing. At the bleeding edge, on zero budget, with only the vaguest ideas of the applications or impact of what you're exploring, this may not be a reasonable assumption. There is a subtlety between "doing" and "applying"; you might "do" in the lab but "apply" in the wild. But as Tom asks, what if you have no lab? When the wild is your lab, either for lack of resources, or because the wild is your object of study, "doing" and "applying" are often one in the same.

Update: Greg Conti has made the CACM issue available as a ZIP archive.

Academic freedom and the hacker ethic

In this issue:
Johnny Cash - Personal File
Natacha Atlas - Mish Maoul
Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You
The Wreckers - Stand Still, Look Pretty
The Ditty Bops - Moon Over the Freeway
Drive-by Truckers - A Blessing And A Curse
Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way
Bird York - Wicked Little High
Casey Dienel - Wind-Up Canary
Corinne Bailey Rae - Corinne Bailey Rae
Eleni Mandell - Country for True Lovers

Johnny Cash - Personal File

Amazon: The recordings Johnny Cash started making for Rick Rubin's American label in 1993 launched a journey through the Great American Songbook--from traditional tunes to alt-rock--that continued until, literally, the end of his life. What wasn't known at the time was that Cash had anticipated the American Recordings concept 20 years earlier. A series of informal private sessions he recorded in 1973 featuring just voice and guitar--with a few numbers added between then and 1982--were left untouched at his House of Cash studio, unearthed only after his death in 2003. These 49 songs, labeled "Personal File," show him exploring 19th-century parlor tunes, Tin Pan Alley pop, gospel, little-known Cash originals, classic and contemporary country, and even a recitation of Robert Service's poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee." On many, his spoken introductions reveal personal ties to a given number. Cash reprises early country fare like Jimmie Rodgers's "My Mother Was a Lady" and "The Letter Edged in Black." He also revisits later country classics like the Louvin Brothers' "When I Stop Dreaming," close friend Johnny Horton's hit "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)," John Prine's "Paradise," and stepdaughter Carlene Carter's "It Takes One to Know Me." The second disc is a virtual hymnbook, blending traditional gospel and A.P. Carter tunes with a sacred composition by Rodney Crowell and Cash gospel originals. For those enchanted by the illness-ravaged soulfulness of Cash's later American recordings, hearing him in his prime is not only breathtaking--it underscores the depth of his still-remarkable musical vision.

Product Description: Deep within the House... [ Read More (1.4k in body) ]

"Ten Things I Hate About Commandments" is a mash-up trailer for a John Hughes style teen comedy, using footage from the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments. It's masterfully done, and milk-out-the-nose funny.

I don't know about "milk-out-the-nose", but I did enjoy the Samuel L. Jackson voiceover.

Boing Boing: If The Ten Commandments was a Teen Comedy

The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate; if foolish, might resist; if intelligent, might balance, as wise and foolish have often tried to do from the beginning; but the forces would continue to educate, and the mind would continue to react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.

Even there his difficulty was extreme. The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought. Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in older literature:—“The cause of this phenomenon is not understood”; "science no longer ventures to explain causes"; "the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken"; "opinions are very much divided"; "in spite of the contradictions involved"; "science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory." Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law.

To educate -- oneself to begin with -- had been the effort of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had gone on doubling with the coal output, until the prospect of waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities, allured one's imagination but slightly. The law of acceleration was definite, and did not require ten years more study except to show whether it held good. No scheme could be suggested to the new American, and no fault needed to be found, or complaint made; but the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive. The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react, -- but it would need to jump.

Henry Adams is worth your time.

A Law of Acceleration | The Education of Henry Adams

Civil Liberties and National Security
By George Friedman
Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2006

USA Today published a story last week stating that U.S. telephone companies (Qwest excepted) had been handing over to the National Security Agency (NSA) logs of phone calls made by American citizens. This has, as one might expect, generated a fair bit of controversy -- with opinions ranging from "It's not only legal but a great idea" to "This proves that Bush arranged 9/11 so he could create a police state." A fine time is being had by all. Therefore, it would seem appropriate to pause and consider the matter.

Let's begin with an obvious question: How in God's name did USA Today find out about a program that had to have been among the most closely held secrets in the intelligence community -- not only because it would be embarrassing if discovered, but also because the entire program could work only if no one knew it was under way? No criticism of USA Today, but we would assume that the newspaper wasn't running covert operations against the NSA. Therefore, someone gave them the story, and whoever gave them the story had to be cleared to know about it. That means that someone with a high security clearance leaked an NSA secret.

Americans have become so numbed to leaks at this point that no one really has discussed the implications of what we are seeing: The intelligence community is hemorrhaging classified information. It's possible that this leak came from one of the few congressmen or senators or staffers on oversight committees who had been briefed on this material -- but either way, we are seeing an extraordinary breakdown among those with access to classified material.

The reason for this latest disclosure is obviously the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to be the head of the CIA. Before his appointment as deputy director of national intelligence, Hayden had been the head of the NSA, where he oversaw the collection and data-mining project involving private phone calls. Hayden's nomination to the CIA has come under heavy criticism from Democrats and Republicans, who argue that he is an inappropriate choice for director. The release of the data-mining story to USA Today obviously was intended as a means of shooting down his nomination -- which it might. But what is important here is not the fate of Hayden, but the fact that the Bush administration clearly has lost all control of the intelligence community -- extended to include congressional oversight processes. That is not a trivial point.

At the heart of the argument is not the current breakdown in Washington, but the more significant question of why the NSA was running such a collection program and whether the program represented a serious threat to liberty. The standard debate is divided into two schools: those who regard the threat to liberty as trivial when compared to the security it provides, and those who regard the security it ... [ Read More (1.8k in body) ]

Civil Liberties and National Security