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

How much does it cost to stage a coup? €21 million, according to

this document

.

It’s the work of a Congolese military group called the

Union des Forces Révolutionnaires du Congo

, keen to topple president Joseph Kabila.

Before they can do that, though, they need to raise some cash. So they have reached out to the diaspora — especially in Belgium — to chip in. And in the process, somebody has put together the budget. The UN got hold of this and included it in a report, giving us all a glimpse of coup planning.

Suborned generals aside, it’s the kind of vague document that will be familiar to any middle manager. Some areas are uncharted territory — “maintaining hold on power” after the coup is a single, unelaborated line item.

Other areas are elaborated into full-fledged fantasies. We know not only that broadcasters will be taken over, but what will be broadcast. “Day Zero” of the coup begins with 2 hours of classical music, for instance. I imagine it

Clockwork Orange

style, Beethoven playing as ministers are dragged from their beds.

The sums don’t add up, the plans seem half-formed, and the whole document smells of wishful thinking. And, having seen the bureaucracy required for government work, I can say for sure: this is one coup Uncle Sam won’t even think about funding.

Britain’s colonial governments burned massive numbers of documents, reports the Guardian, rather than hand them over to their successor states.

Under what the British called “Operation Legacy”, they destroyed anything that “might embarrass [the] government”. In Northern Rhodesia this specifically included “

all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty’s government

Real-estate prices rise in Nairobi. Who do you blame? Somali pirates.

Suppose you’re a pirate. You’re sitting on a pile of ransom money — it topped $100/million a year during the piracy boom. You need to launder it, and store it somewhere more secure than Somalia. So you turn to construction, that classic route for cleaning excess cash. Looking for somewhere reasonably close, with a large Somali community, you end up in Nairobi.

A government investigation has been launched into soaring property prices in Kenya amid claims that Somali pirates are behind the unusual real estate boom which has seen prices increase three fold in the last few years.

…

In a neighbourhood of Nairobi now called ‘Little Mogadishu’ because of its Somali community, large business and apartment buildings have sprung up. A similar explosion of real estate development can be seen in higher income areas of the city.

It’s a nice story, but it doesn’t quite add up. Criminal house-building should lower prices, not raise them. Purchases of existing buildings might increase sale prices, but won’t much affect rentals unless the Somalis are living in Nairobi.

Besides, there just isn’t that much money in piracy. Nairobi’s GDP is perhaps $24 billion. $1000 million from piracy is a drop in the ocean

Most likely, the pirate housing story is just another way of blaming foreigners for local problems. It’s certainly causing difficulty for Nairobi’s Somali population:

Yet mud sticks, and many Somalis are concerned that the small of amount of pirate money coming through Eastleigh will continue to damage the neighborhood’s reputation.

“If piracy money is allowed to infiltrate into the local market here in Eastleigh, then our hard-earned money will be spoiled and soon we may close our line of businesses,” said Diriye Jamal, who owns a textile shop.

For money-laundering, one of the most useful businesses is something involving small, high-value items which can be sold for cash. Ideally you want things bought by the public (so you can easily get money to/from anybody), resaleable (so you can get multiple transactions), and whose value is hard to quantify (so you can increase or decrease the price as required)

Art is great for this. China’s art market is most famed as a tool of corruption — a piece of art is an elegant gift for an official — but can also be used in other forms of fraud. It doesn’t much matter if it is good, bad, or even fake.

Susan Grossey reports on increased global interest in another sector: fine French Wine:

Chinese criminals have joined their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in targeting French vineyards – not for tasting, but for owning….

[French anti-money-laundering agency Tracfin reported] that some buyers of vineyards were using “complex judicial arrangements with holding companies located in fiscally privileged countries”, making it difficult to establish the origin and legality of the funds brought into France.

Got some dirty dollars? Invest them in Argentina!. The government has a plan to let you turn tainted dollars legal; you just need to find an Argentinian to buy property with your cash:

The scheme, referred to locally as the “laundering law”, invites those with undeclared dollars to invest in property and the energy industry without facing penalties for their previous financial chicanery. The government believes that Argentines have about $160 billion tucked under their mattresses or hidden away in foreign bank accounts. That is about four times the value of Argentina’s foreign currency reserves.

To disapprove of writing is something of a tactical mistake, from a memetic point of view. Most of the ancient arguments against writing must have been lost because, well, nobody wrote them down.

Socrates, at least, managed to have his cake and eat it. Part of his Phaedrus is devoted to outlining the limits of writing — but since

Phaedrus

itself was written down, we can at least follow his arguments.

Being Mr. Dialogue, Socrates loathes the fact that

writing can’t answer questions

; a text gives “one unvarying answer” whatever you ask it. Also — an argument surely understandable by anybody who has studied classics or philosophy — he worries that written texts will be passed down through generations of people who never really understand them.

Finally — and part of the reason I’m posting this — Socrates fears writing will undermine memory. He recounts that an Egyptian king, Thamus, was approached by the god Thoth. Thoth offered Egypt all kinds of knowledge, including writing. King Thamus turned down the gift of writing, lest it destroy Egyptians’ memories:

[Writing], said Theuth, will

make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories

; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied:…. this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because

they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters

and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Socrates, then, is the moderate anti-scribe, the one who scraped into history because his disciple, Plato, was willing to commit something to paper.

If you want the extreme of the anti-writing faction, try Pythagoras. Not only did he avoid writing anything, he made sure his followers did the same. For a century or more, many people built their life around his maxims (“

acusmata

“), handed down orally within the cult of Pythagoras. Disciples abjured not just writing but even speaking, beginning with 5 years of total silence and continuing to keep some ideas secret within the sect. This “

Pythagorean silence

” had the effect that, according to one Greek writer, people “marvel more at the silence of those who profess to be his pupils than at those who have the greatest reputation for speaking”.

Well, perhaps. The above, like everything we “know” about Pythagoras, is a compote of rumour and guesswork. Pythagoras only narrowly avoided the oblivion usual for those who avoid writing. We know little about the likely core of his work — as a religious leader, a philosopher of reincarnation, and founder of a lifestyle of ritual and self-discipline. Instead he is now remembered for a theorem on triangles which he probably didn’t even invent. Bad luck, Pythagoras — try writing a book in your next reincarnation, mmkay?

I can’t help wondering, though, how many other Pythagoras-like figures there have been in history. People of great immediate influence, whose lives left no longer mark because they distrusted writing. Probably they account for the vast majority of pre-modern thinkers. I’d say we should remember them, but we can’t.

You’re a money launderer. You’re keen that, even if you get caught, you should get off with a minimal sentence. Here’s how to arrange your life:

• 
  Remorse
  
• Good character and/or exemplary conduct
• Serious medical condition requiring urgent, intensive or long-term treatment
• Sole or primary carer for dependent relatives
• Early active co-operation particularly in complex cases
• Determination and/or demonstration of steps having been taken to address offending behaviour
• Activity originally legitimate

These — via Susan Grossey — are from proposed UK sentencing guidelines for fraud, bribery and money laundering. . They are the planned ‘mitigating factors’ — reasons to reduce a sentence. Demonstrate tese to the court, and you’ll have an easier time of it.

The problem is, most of these are things a well-lawyered fraudster will have an easy time showing — as Susan hints, they are “

a standard disguise for your professional launderer

”