Month: January 2014

I’ve read a fair few blogposts on how to pack a suitcase. This guide from Cameo, though, must be one of the most thorough and impressive.

Syrian refugees are selling their organs in Lebanon, according to Der Spiegel:

Abu Hussein said that in the last few months he has driven 15 or 16 kidney donors – all of them Syrians aged between 14 and 30 – to the secret clinic masquerading as a residential building. The clinic has the most modern medical equipment and doesn’t want to limit itself to kidneys. “I’m currently looking for someone who has an eye for sale.”

Der Spiegel

claims the going rate for a kidney is $7,000; according to Middle East Monitor it is just $670. The latter also cites a WHO guesstimate on the size of the market:

There is no exact information on the size of this business, but the WHO estimates that there is at least 10,000 kidneys sold worldwide, a large proportion of which originate in Lebanon; around 10 per cent of organ transplants around the world are such commercial transactions.

Bruce Sterling, quoting Victorian essayist William Dean Howells, explains the appeal of pictures of ruins:

The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one’s vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner’s rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.

Seems spot-on to me, and I say that as a committed addict of Urban Decay and the like.

LOL My Thesis gives those who have accomplished a PhD a greater challenge: describe it in a sentence. Some favourite attempts:

• The ancient Romans had a pretty large army, all things considered. (Ancient History, Oxford)
• If you watch gay people on TV you are more likely to want them to get married. (Political Science, Oklahoma State University)
• The government hiring people is a good way to bring down unemployment; we stopped doing it because we are stupid. (Policy History, UCSB)
• Turns out that if you want people to like you during a war, you probably shouldn’t blow up their house. (Political Science & History, Fairmont State University)

Something is seriously wrong when Russian courts are more protective of civil liberties than those in the USA. But that’s the case with metadata collection, at least on paper. Obama excused blanket phone surveillance because it only collected “so-called metadata”, so spooks did not need to “go back to a federal judge”. Andrei Soldatov, surely the best-informed journalist covering the Russian intelligence services, reports that they are more limited:

When Russia’s intelligence agencies collect metadata without a court order, it violates Russian laws. In September 2012, the country’s Supreme Court issued an interpretation stating that both a subscriber’s phone number and the connections between subscribers are confidential elements of phone conversations. The court ruled that “obtaining such information is an invasion of privacy and abridges citizens’ constitutional right to confidential telephone conversations” and that “agencies performing operational and search activities must obtain a court order to gain access to such information.”

Russian spooks doubtless dodge such legal bounds with the same fluidity as their American counterparts. Still, it is striking that the US government has sunk so low as to be seriously comparable to Russia.

First the UN and now the EU have banned exporting weapons to the Central African Republic.

So I thought I’d take a quick look at where the weapons are coming from. This is going to come in two parts. First I’ll cover what is in official documentation. Then I’ll go back and take a peek at journalistic and NGO reports, which in this case turn out to contain far more useful information.

Step one is trade database Comtrade. According to that, Spain has consistently send small quantities of guns and ammunition in, month by month. A bit further back we see Slovakia, with a $1.5m shipment in May 2011. France, the former colonial power which still considers itself peacemaker in the region, has chipped in smaller chunks.

These are just total amounts sold, in fairly broad categories. To see some detail of specific transfers we can turn to

Then you can look at the UN Register of Conventional Arms. This shows international sales of weapons systems, as reported to the UN. It only contains heavy weaponry — in the self-description, “

seven categories of arms, which are deemed the most lethal ones

“. There’s also a smattering of information on small arms, which gets submitted even though it isn’t quite required.

The official database is less useful than the version by SIPRI, which combines it with other data sources.

Here we can see a separate transfer from Slovakia in 2008 for 3 armored vehicles. There are a couple of helicopters from Ukraine in 2011, and a plane from the USA back in 2006.

It’s slim pickings, though. Even for a small country (CAR’s population is about 4.5 million), this is clearly not enough to supply a war. The weapons come from elsewhere: old stocks, imports from neighboring countries, or transfers kept off the books.

In a day or two I’ll come back and take a look through the less official sources of information, and see what arms transfer routes we can infer.

Here’s the latest graph of killings in Iraq from Iraq Body Count. We’re back up to death rates comparable to 2003-4, certainly worse than things have been for a few years.

IBC summarizes the events of the year:

The year started with protests and rising discontent. The Sunnis demanded reforms, while the government of Nouri al-Maliki abandoned any efforts to be cross sectarian, targeting Sunni politicians, arresting and interrogating and forcing some into exile. After the April 23 protest turned violent and the Iraqi Security Forces attacked protesters, killing 49 of them, the retaliation resulted in the number of civilian deaths tripling in the next 6 months. While 1,900 civilians were killed between October 2012 and March 2013, 6,300 were killed between April and October 2013.

I’d just add that the current rise is particularly worrying, in that it comes in winter. Iraq’s heaviest violence has tended to take place in summer. So if things are this bad even in winter, we can expect them to get much worse come summer.

emptywheel do great reporting on the political use of drones. They argue in particular that the US has used drone strikes to sabotage peace negotiations in Afghanistan, literally by assassinating the negotiators or their comrades.

So when a drone killed Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, the US media seemed baffled that Pakistan was not happy:

Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

But emptywheel cites reports that Mehsud’s party were due to attend peace talks the next day

[Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan] said the identity of those killed in the drone strike was irrelevant. “The government of Pakistan does not see this drone attack as an attack on an individual but as an attack on the peace process,” he said.

This fits an ongoing pattern:

in early October, the US snatched Latif Mehsud from Afghan intelligence after they had spent months trying to convince him to help them initiate peace talks… And with momentum gathering again for peace talks, Brennan even strayed outside the tribal areas of Pakistan in a botched attempt to kill Sirajuddin Haqqani, but still managed to kill a senior fundraiser for the Haqqani network.

Julia Evans has been collecting questions to ask a tech company during a job interview with them. It’s a really good list. Many of the questions would also be useful in other contexts, including as something to ask about yourself. Some I particularly liked:

• How/when do developers talk to non-developers? Is it easy to talk to the people who are will be using your product?
• Can you give me an example of someone who’s been in a technical role at your company for a long time, and how their responsibilities and role have changed?
• Has there been a situation where someone raised an ethical concern? If so, how was it handled? If not, have there really not been any?
• Can I see some code the team I’m interviewing for has written? (from an open-source project you work on, for example)
• How are disagreements solved – both technical disagreements and other kinds? What happens when personalities clash?
• Is it possible to take sabbaticals or unpaid vacation?
• How many women work for you? What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways?
• How does internal communication work? This one is super important and I need to remember to ask it more.
• Do you contribute to open source projects? Which projects? Which teams work on open source? Do you work mostly in the community or do you have a private fork?
• Do your employees speak at conferences about your work?
• Is there any sort of institutionalized way of dealing with plateauing or preventing burnout?

I’m sitting in Berlin, slowly returning to consensus reality after an intense week at the Chaos Communication Congress.

The CCC is close to indescribable. It’s a huge computer security conference, whose speakers routinely turn up and announce they have broken some key part of the world’s technical infrastructure. But the real action happens in the halls full of friends and tinkerers, working together on an unfathomably large collection of technical

Most importantly for me: it is socially and politically engaged, far beyond what you might encounter elsewhere in the technical world. I don’t mean just the deliberately political areas like ‘noisysquare’, where I spent most of my time, but the pervading attitude throughout the congress. Distrust of authority, desire to build an internet that resists censorship and surveillance, and a deep concern with the social implications of our work.

This year some fake ‘recruiters’ pranked the conference, with the help of the organizers. They approached some 500 attendees with job offers from a dubious-sounding private security firm. To the general pride of the congress almost all rejected the offer; the few who didn’t were taken aside, told about the prank, and asked to reconsider their morals.

I heard the Congress compared a few times to Burning Man. That more shows the lack of other reference points than any real similarity. Still, there was something burner-ish about the reappropriated police truck in the basement, complete with water cannon (“liquid democracy”) and covered in dancers and partiers. And then there was the mile-long series of tubes carrying messages across the building, pneumatically powered by a phalanx of vacuum cleaners. And the French digital rights contingent in their curtained enclave quietly drinking tea on low tables — an atmosphere designed to calm those in altered states, whether chemical or the sheer joy of hacking.

Going to the Congress feels increasingly like coming home, even if it’s a home I only see each year. It’s one of few environments that can make me feel simultaneously relaxed and inspired — awestruck and accepted by a crowd of incredible people, daunted by their accomplishments and aware of how much work needs to be done. It’ll be in my mind until the end of 2014.

For extra fun, here is a TV report from the first Congress in 1984. It’s still a surprisingly good description of themes that have stayed with the CCC for three decades: unease around journalists, data protection, legal wrangles and long nights of hacking