IP: Worth Reading -- Councils of War

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 10:12:09 -0500
> To: dave () farber net, Phil Agre <pagre () alpha oac ucla edu>
> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rahettinga () earthlink net>
> Subject: [ISN] Councils of War
>
>
> --- begin forwarded text
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> Status:  U
> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 02:35:48 -0600 (CST)
> From: InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>
> To: isn () attrition org
> Subject: [ISN] Councils of War
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> Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/02/fallows.htm
>
> The Atlantic Monthly
> February 2002
> by James Fallows
>
> There is no mistaking the excitement in Washington when world news
> originates here. Through the second Clinton Administration it was easy
> to think that a drive down Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay area
> brought one closer to the real centers of power -Oracle, Intel, Cisco-
> than a drive along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the
> Capitol. In Silicon Valley and Seattle the technology industry's
> leaders talked about the "withering away of the state," and in
> Washington the arrival of technology-driven prosperity was the central
> fact of political life.
>
> However distant that seems now, the corrective reaction is, perhaps
> inevitably, going too far. I may be biased from having spent several
> years in Seattle and San Francisco before returning last summer to
> Washington. But now that the state is back, I am struck by the
> assumption here that if there is truly significant technology at the
> moment, it is the kind the military has used in Afghanistan. During
> the weeks when Taliban forces were collapsing, I did see three
> applications of technology with important economic, political, and
> even terrorism-related implications. Each was plain old civilian
> technology.
>
> In one case the technology is e-mail, which has made possible the
> "open-source intelligence" movement. For decades diplomats and
> soldiers have bitterly joked that most important international secrets
> are likely to show up in the newspaper before they make their way
> through classified channels. Obviously, governments can still keep
> secrets. An illustration: three months after the terrorist attacks the
> Federal Aviation Administration was still enforcing strict "no-fly
> zones" -ones forbidden to private noncommercial aircraft- over three
> cities. Two were the terrorists' targets: Washington, the political
> capital, and New York, the financial capital. The third was ...
> Boston. Not San Francisco, capital of the technology industry; not Los
> Angeles, capital of America's image-making industry; not Chicago,
> capital of exposed skyscrapers. I asked Steven Brown, the FAA official
> in charge of airspace, why Boston? Because the planes that hit New
> York took off there? He said, essentially, If you knew what we know,
> you'd understand. What he actually said was "The vulnerabilities in
> Boston, those known to the public and others, are unique." Until we do
> know what he knows, there's no choice but to take it on faith. Maybe
> this is where Dick Cheney has been.
>
> But the strictures secrecy requires can make it hard for armies or
> security units to get full, timely information in emergencies. One
> solution is to circulate non-secret information. In the mid-1980s the
> retired Air Force colonel John Boyd attracted adherents, especially in
> the Marine Corps, with his view that "fast feedback" loops were the
> key to military success. That is, the army that could observe and
> react to its opponents' movements the fastest would be the most likely
> to prevail. A young Marine captain named G. I. Wilson drew from Boyd's
> work the idea that the military should look for information as widely
> as possible. "It takes both unclassified open source resources and
> classified intelligence to win in today's information age," Wilson
> wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1995, with Major Frank Bunkers.
>
> In practice "open-source resources" means what the best foreign
> correspondents and embassy political officers have always tried to
> keep abreast of, but on a bigger scale: reports in local papers,
> sudden changes in what's available in stores, snippets from the radio.
> Over the past decade Wilson and his colleagues have set up several
> electronic networks. The largest, called Access Intelligence (AI),
> connects hundreds of people in the defense, intelligence,
> law-enforcement, commercial, and academic worlds. It works like a
> normal list server or electronic mailing list: one person posts a
> message and everyone else receives it as e-mail moments later. The AI
> network often produces a hundred or more messages a day; recipients
> quickly scan the titles for subjects they are interested in. Although
> many AI members have security clearance, the material posted is
> strictly "open source" publicly available news reports or personal
> observations. That way the question of violating security rules won't
> come up.
>
> AI has proved a valuable supplement to the slower, more controlled
> channels of official communication—much as cell phones did for many
> civilians on September 11. For instance, Rick Forno, a computer expert
> who helps to operate the AI list, was in a building overlooking the
> Pentagon; he posted real-time reports about areas of damage and
> unfolding events before some of them appeared on CNN. Wilson, who is
> now a colonel based at Camp Pendleton, has relayed messages to ships'
> crews during (pre-Afghanistan) combat operations. "I can tell them
> what's being reported here, and they compare it to what they are
> seeing," he told me recently.
>
> Open-source intelligence "frequently appears less valuable than
> classified information because it does not carry the classification
> mystique," Wilson wrote in 1995. "Because it appears less valuable, it
> is shared more freely and used more. The irony is by sharing it more
> the information's value and usefulness increases." Within the
> Pentagon, Wilson told me, reports that were posted on AI have been
> stamped with classified markings and used in briefings. An old trick
> of John Boyd's, Wilson said, was to get data into circulation by
> leaving it in "the head."
>
> Still, the AI network doesn't get respect. "It's not popular with the
> intelligence community, because it doesn't cost anything," Wilson told
> me. (Forno and Bill Feinbloom, a former Green Beret, run it as
> volunteers, and it is free to all users.) "But you've got about three
> hundred people acting as individual sensors, from a whole variety of
> backgrounds. I may say something that seems commonsensical to a
> Marine, but someone who's a physicist will come back and say no, it
> can't have worked that way."
>
> If the AI network is the application of e-mail to the
> military-intelligence business, a new company called Development Space
> represents the application of eBay to international aid. In the
> quarter century plus of the personal-computer age a few seminal
> applications have suddenly made computers necessities for new groups
> of people. The first was VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program,
> whose introduction in 1979 gave small businesses a reason to own
> computers. The next was the coming of e-mail. And the most recent is
> eBay, the online auction site. Whereas Amazon.com, for instance,
> offers a faster, more convenient version of a familiar shopping
> experience, eBay creates something that didn't exist before: a
> self-policing worldwide market matching buyers and sellers of even the
> most obscure goods. I am generally skeptical of "perfect markets" as
> laid out in economics textbooks, but an eBay auction for a used car, a
> signed baseball glove, or a new digital camera comes close. Those who
> want to sell have the largest audience of buyers; those who want to
> buy have the largest selection to choose from; and each party can
> judge whether to trust the other by means of a rating system based on
> past transactions (and a cautionary label on those with no record
> yet).
>
> Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi, two employees of the World Bank who
> had served around the globe, decided in 1998 to try to match resources
> and need just as directly in the public sector. Their first approach
> was bricks-and-mortar: a one-day Innovation Marketplace inside the
> atrium of the Bank's headquarters, in Washington. Normally proposals
> for Bank projects wend their way through a tedious multi-stage vetting
> process. On this one day anyone who worked for the Bank could set up a
> little booth, science-fair style, and make a pitch for a project; at
> the end of the day a jury would award grants to the best ones. More
> than a hundred teams made presentations, and eleven got awards,
> totaling $3 million.
>
> Whittle and Kuraishi next persuaded the Bank to hold a two-day fair,
> with applications accepted from anyone who wanted to come and present
> an idea. More than 1,100 groups, from eighty countries, sent
> proposals. The heart of the program was letting people who knew
> firsthand about a local need or dream—a well, a road, a small
> business—explain what the money could do. A group of war widows in
> Bosnia, for example, offered a plan for a small, high-end knitting
> operation. The World Bank brought more than 300 finalists to
> Washington; and the forty-four winners got grants averaging just over
> $100,000 and totaling about $5 million. (The war widows won, and now
> they are prosperous, selling their output mainly to fashion houses in
> Europe and the United States.)
>
> Electronic publicity explains the tenfold increase in applications.
> "Once this idea gets into e-mail circulation, it is amazing how fast
> it gets around the world," Whittle told me. "People who didn't have
> Internet access were contacted by those who did and encouraged to try.
> One Turkish guy was strutting around like a proud father at a Phi Beta
> Kappa ceremony five of the finalists had found out about the program
> from him."
>
> Whittle and Kuraishi thought that if the concept worked despite the
> real-world impediments of getting applicants to one place at one time,
> it would work all the better if it were also implemented
> electronically. In 2000 they resigned from the Bank, and just as the
> Internet economy was beginning to falter, they created an online
> company, Development Space, which began operation last month. Like
> eBay, it is meant to let the "market" in this case for development aid
> clear at minimum cost and with little or no bureaucratic interference.
> People who want money for vaccines, for an orphanage, for a small
> factory can prepare online descriptions of their projects, with help
> from advisers, if necessary, in drawing up business plans.
> Foundations and government aid agencies that intend to give money but
> also individuals who will give, say, $250 if they think it will help
> survey the projects and decide which to support. Various inspection
> and feedback systems will establish a track record, as on eBay, and
> follow up to see how the money was used.
>
> A number of environmental foundations have approached Development
> Space to explore using this platform to find projects to support. If
> America's past wars are any guide, huge amounts of recovery assistance
> will soon be headed to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where
> else. This model could be a lower-cost, better-targeted way of getting
> it there.
>
> Open-source intelligence and an eBay for foreign aid are extensions of
> the Internet's model of information flow. The third innovation comes
> from a company called Athena Technologies, and it's an extension of
> the ongoing hardware revolution.
>
> In 1992 a young South African named David Vos was preparing for his
> Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at MIT. His dissertation project was
> to build a guidance system that would let a unicycle propel itself,
> with no rider. I have seen a videotape of his presentation. On an
> arctic day in Boston a shaggy, tired-looking graduate student in a ski
> jacket (Vos) hovers inches away from a unicycle, ready like a parent
> to reach out and support it. But the unicycle keeps itself erect and
> propels itself around a basketball court, responding to commands from
> something on top that looks like a cake box.
>
> The mechanism inside the box was Vos's achievement: a system of
> inertial sensors and quick-response motors that could detect changes
> in the unicycle's balance eighteen times a second and issue the right
> corrective command. A tricycle is of course inherently stable, and a
> bicycle has a kind of stability when moving. But because a unicycle is
> always trying to fall over, most people cannot react quickly enough to
> control it, and no mechanical device had previously been able to.
>
> Ten years later Athena, Vos's company, has produced a device that
> drives not unicycles or people, like the inventor Dean Kamen's highly
> publicized "IT" vehicle but airplanes, and with significant
> implications for defense. The device is known as GuideStar, and it is
> about the size of a car radio. Packed with inertial sensors and logic
> circuits, it is capable of detecting and reacting to changes fifty
> times a second and of flying aircraft that are too tricky or unstable
> for human pilots to control. Vos made another video to underscore the
> point. In it an odd-looking airplane one big wing and no tail sits on
> a runway. Without a tail an aircraft would be even more unstable than
> a unicycle and, according to simulation models, would require such
> constant and immediate adjustments that even a skilled pilot would
> quickly lose control of it. But in the video this jet-powered tailless
> plane zooms off the runway and then circles several times before it
> lands, to the joyous whoops of Vos's team in the background.
>
> GuideStar has civilian potential for instance, as part of the
> autopilot in small planes or airliners, permitting them to land in
> circumstances that overwhelm the pilot. Another device shown in Vos's
> videos suggests military and civilian uses alike. This is a vehicle,
> built by the Micro Craft company and guided by Vos's systems, that
> looks like a large smudgepot, with a cylindrical base and a vertical
> shaft, powered by a compact engine. It can take off straight up,
> maneuver itself around corners, travel at altitudes from treetop level
> to a few hundred feet, and land straight down. In the civilian world
> this could be a jazzy counterpart to Kamen's "IT" vehicle, delivering
> parcels rather than people. For the military it could also be a remote
> sensing device, far cheaper than current pilotless drone aircraft.
>
> But what Athena has been touting since September 11 is that its
> GuideStar controls could be programmed to prevent any airplane from
> ever going someplace it should not. No airliner, we can assume, will
> ever be flown into a skyscraper again: the passengers will not let it
> happen. But in theory it could still happen with a FedEx or a UPS
> cargo plane. The coordinates of restricted areas and important
> buildings could be entered into the new guidance system, which could
> thwart a pilot's attempts to divert the plane. In principle the system
> could land the airplane at a military airfield if it sensed abnormal
> commands.
>
> What do these innovations have in common, apart from reminding us of
> the fecundity of the high-tech world despite the Nasdaq's slide? They
> show two crucial traits of the civilian tech world in general, and
> these traits distinguish them from most military technology.
>
> First, they are cheap. The open-source network is literally free to
> its users. Development Space plans to support the eBay model of
> foreign aid by taking a seven percent cut of all transactions, to pay
> for expert teams and authenticators much less than the overhead of
> most charities. The Athena controls are both cheaper and more powerful
> than current autopilots. "We come from the computer-industry mindset
> that the price has to keep going down," says Jeffrey Leonard, who is
> on Athena's board of directors.
>
> It is easy to forget how important the race to cheapness was in
> creating the technology boom. Indeed, the Internet's main business
> problem is that users think content should be free. The contrast with
> military technology is sharp.
>
> A B-52 bomber, for example, costs about $23,000 per flight hour just
> to operate; the B-2, which makes long treks to Afghanistan from its
> home base in Missouri, costs at least twice as much. During the Kosovo
> bombing campaign the United States reduced Serb defenses by firing
> HARM missiles, which lock onto the beam from a radar station and then
> destroy the station. The Serb army reportedly discovered that it could
> place microwave ovens in open fields and the HARMs would think the
> ovens were radar stations. Each oven cost less than $100; each missile
> it attracted cost $750,000. We pay any price for freedom, and the
> costs mount up. The idea of a race for cheapness has not spread from
> the civilian to the military world.
>
> Second, these innovations don't try to replace what is best about
> human judgment and intelligence. The most popular breakthroughs in the
> commercial-tech market have let people do more of what they have
> always wanted to do: buy, sell, interact, explore. Open-source
> intelligence and Development Space follow this model as well.
> GuideStar does replace a human function, but a calculator-like one, at
> which machines should ultimately exceed human abilities as
> spreadsheets do, and language-translation programs do not. In
> principle the military would always prefer to use machines instead of
> men. Machines don't have grieving families; they don't need to be
> recruited and trained. Some of the most expensive boondoggles in
> military technology have involved attempts to mechanize the most
> sophisticated human abilities which include, surprisingly, the ability
> to detect patterns. Any human being can tell a camel from a car.
> Designing sensors that can reliably do so is very hard. That is why
> even in the phenomenal rout of the Taliban army, the bombing became
> effective only after special-operations troops, on foot and on horses,
> were there to identify the right targets.
>
> This war began with a devastatingly brilliant bit of jujitsu, in which
> the very openness of our society and elegance of our technology were
> turned against us. The stages ahead will certainly call not for
> brute-force technical power alone but for a shrewd combination of
> human and technological abilities a lesson the military can take from
> the civilian world.
>
>
>
> *==============================================================*
> "Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
> without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah () ibuc com>
> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
> "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
> [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
> experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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