The French interior minister Claude Gueant has decided to launch a viral marketing campaign to spread the notoriety of https://copwatchnord-idf.org, a sousveillance commune attempting to enforce police accountability. Displaying a cunning knowledge of mass communications, he let a court order the whole site made inaccessible; thus drawing the ire of free speech activists and ensuring excellent conditions for a nice Streisand Effect. Even before the court order has been implemented there are already a wealth of alternative ways to access the site’s content – among others I2P, ED2K, Bittorrent and a nicely growing list of mirrors including one on this site (IPv6 only – let’s promote IPv6 while we are at it) which will stay up until I get a court order to take it down or police pressure I can’t handle. Funniest thing is that I haven’t even read the content of the site.

I could have mirrored it anonymously, but civil disobedience doesn’t carry much of a message if you are not ready to do it in your own name: provoking a debate is the whole point of my involvement.

What triggered the French Copwatch case is the site’s naming of law enforcement officers, in infraction of French law regulating the collection, storage, and use of personal data. There are also claims of slander and libel, but those are not worthy of discussion – the targeting of individuals is the meat of the case brought forth by police unions.

It may surprise you but I agree with the police unions : naming law enforcement officers and systematically exposing their personal data in a manner making them personally more vulnerable to public anger is bad.

So why am I misbehaving by mirroring https://copwatchnord-idf.org on my host ? To have you talk about it. This is about ensuring that no one wants to publish something like Copwatch anymore. Even if law enforcement manages to stomp all the Web ants, technologies such as Tor hidden services and I2P guarantee that there is no way to eradicate information anymore – only to make it more difficult for the non technophile public to reach. So if we don’t want sites like Copwatch, it is the cause that must be attacked – Copwatch is only the symptom of some deeper disease.

In the French republic, law enforcement has a monopoly on legitimate violence, which is a good thing. In addition, law enforcement has powerful surveillance tools – those have never been as powerful as they are now, and their power is still growing. As the popular saying goes : “with great power comes great responsibility” – law enforcement is fine but only if it is accountable. Copwatch’s efforts may be misguided, but they illustrate a growing frustration from those involved in police violence and faced with police impunity: where to turn to for accountability when facing staggering power asymmetry ? They answer by starting an arms race between censor and watchers. No good will come out of that – we must make peace now : accept that censorship is pointless and imagine alternatives that guarantee that cases of illegitimate police violence are treated fairly – or even better, that they don’t happen.

A fight between the people and its own law enforcement is a losing proposition for every party involved – don’t do it ! Instead, make sure that institutional and individual acts of violence are easily documented and brought to court. Law enforcement is viable only if the people trusts its officers, but the relationship between the people and law enforcement is increasingly broken… Can we fix that ?

To make law enforcement officers accountable for their individual acts of violence, data must be collected from witnesses. But how to do it without naming them and exposing their personal data in a manner making them personally more vulnerable to public anger ? My proposal is to make prominent personal identifier displays part of what a law enforcement officer must feature to act legitimately as such. This identifier must point to the individual while keeping him anonymous. It must be displayed large enough to be readable through photography. This is only a single technical proposition, but the general idea to be pushed is for the police to be put under surveillance by the citizens who can easily gather enough information for  proper judiciary proceedings while protecting the individuals involved from extra-judiciary threats.

With a culture of accountability in place and enough eyes over the police, sites such as Copwatch would be pointless… Everybody wins. Don’t fear the sunshine and let’s talk about solutions !

Whether you like Alvin Toffler or not, he is a visionary with exceptional acuity, and this quote cited by John Perry Barlow was no exception to his outstanding output :

“Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness” – Alvin Toffler

I had never encountered it, so I wondered about where it first appeared. Not finding anything on the Web besides reproductions of the quote blindly attributing it to Alvin Toffler, I asked John Perry Barlow who promptly solved the mystery : “He said this to me in an interview I did of them in 1997″ – no wonder I couldn’t find it.

Thanks John - I updated Alvin Toffler’s Wikiquote page.

And let’s hope someone tells my employer that freedom of expression is good for business !

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. Share, remix, reuse - just do it for fun, for profit and for the public good… Once the data is liberated, good things will follow ! Alas, some Cassandra beg to differ.

Can the output of a process based entirely on publicly available data be considered unfit for public availability ? As Marek Mahut explains in “The danger of transparency: A lesson from Slovakia“, the answer is ‘yes’ according to a court in Bratislava who ordered immediate censorship of some information produced by an application whose input is entirely composed of publicly available data.

As a French citizen, I’m not surprised – for more than thirty years, our law has recognized how the merging of data sources is a danger to privacy.

I was prepared to translate the relevant section of the original French text of “Act N°78-17 of 6 January 1978 on data processing, data files and individual liberties” for you… But in its great benevolence, my government has kindly provided an official translation – so I’ll use that… Here is the relevant extract :

Chapter IV, Section 2 : Authorisation
Article 25
I. – The following may be carried out after authorisation by the “Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés” , with the exception of those mentioned in Articles 26 (State security and criminal offences processing) and 27 (public processing NIR, i.e. social security number – State biometrics –census – e-government online services):
[..]
5° automatic processing whose purpose is:
- the combination of files of one or several legal entities who manage a public service and whose purposes relate to different public interests;
- the combination of other entities’ files of which the main purposes are different.

Short version : if you want to join data from two isolated sources, you need to ask and receive authorization first, on a case-by-case basis.

That law only applies to personal data, which it defines (Chapter I, Article 2) as ‘any information relating to a natural person who is or can be identified, directly or indirectly’. That last word opens a big can of worms : data de-anonymization techniques have shown that with sufficient detail, anonymous data can be linked to individuals. With that knowledge, one may consider that the whole Open Data movement falls in the shadow of that law.

To my knowledge this question has not yet been brought before a court, so there is therefore no case law to guide us… But it is only a matter of time – watch this space !

In his usual grandstanding style, Nicolas Sarkozy has made bold statements about limited air strikes against Libyan targets which include Gaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia command headquarters in Tripoli, an important airbase in Sirte and the key Sebha military complex in the south.

Apart from the slight diplomatic problem that this theatrical gesture has little support across Europe and the ethical problem of banking on emotional reaction to jockey for post-revolutionary oil contracts, there is the technical problem of how to proceed against the Libyan air defense network – here are a few extracts from Sean O’Connor’s excellent analysis in May 2010 :

Libya possesses one of the most robust air defense networks on the African continent, falling second only to Egypt in terms of coverage and operational systems. Libyan strategic SAM assets are primarily arrayed along the coastline, ostensibly defending the bulk of the Libyan population and preventing foreign incursion into Libyan airspace.

Part of the current problem stems from international sanctions placed on Libya during the 1980s which effectively stifled any serious chances of upgrading or replacing obsolete systems. The rest of the problem lies in the systems themselves. All three strategic SAM types operated by Libya have been thoroughly exploited by Western intelligence agencies, and many Western nations have faced these same systems in combat at various times, allowing for continued refinement of ECM systems designed to defeat these weapons electronically. Also, no strategic SAM system operated by Libya possesses a multi-target engagement capability. The only SAM sites representing a threat to multiple aircraft are the S-200 locations, as they possess multiple 5N62 (SQUARE PAIR) engagement radars. As such, even though Libyan strategic SAM sites are arrayed to provide overlapping fields of fire while defending a given area, the relatively small number of sites represents a threat to only a small number of targets. As a result, the overall network is easily susceptible to oversaturation.

The second drawback to Libya’s strategic SAM network is one of layout. If it is accepted that older Soviet-era systems may still be reliable against regional aggressors lacking modern, sophisticated EW or ECM suites, the system still has a significant number of gaps that could be exploited. The S-200 represents the only significant over water threat, but is constrained by having a minimum engagement altitude of 300 meters. Any terrain-hugging aircraft or cruise missiles would easily be able to exploit this weakness to approach the Libyan coastline. Once the coastline has been reached, the most obvious point of ingress would be the area adjacent to the Gulf of Sidra, which is devoid of deployed strategic SAM assets. Furthermore, as evidenced in the image seen previously, there are gaps between areas covered by S-75 and S-125 batteries which could also be exploited. This does not of course take into account the presence or performance of interceptors, AAA, or tactical SAM units, as these systems are outside the scope of this analysis.

At the end of the day, the Libyan strategic SAM network requires a massive infusion of new technology to remain viable in the twenty first century. It was not capable of repelling an attack over twenty years ago, and there is no reason to suspect that it will be capable of such action today.

The article overall dismisses an aging system with gaping deficiencies, but expressions such as “easily susceptible to oversaturation” betray the bias of USian abundance : few nations can casually assemble a strike package of 45 aircraft and send it over Libya like the USA did in 1986. And it is not just quantity – few nations have anywhere near the SEAD capability of the USA… Certainly not France in any case.

Unlike Tornado ECR users who still operate AGM-88 HARM, France has not had anti-radar missiles since it removed the AS37 Martel from service in the early 1990s. France has no dedicated SEAD assets left… Is maintenance of law and order in the colonies the only ambition of independent action that France can afford nowadays ? Of course, even when a consensus is beyond European diplomatic means, France is supposed to cooperate with its close allies for a semblance of international credibility… But the ally that holds the critical assets still has considerably more influence over how the decisions of the coalition. In Europe, Germany and Italy are the only nations left to operate specialized SEAD aircraft. Is France doomed ? Not yet : there is more to this story than just anti-radiation missiles…

You remember that the AGM-88 HARM did not produce very good results during the1999 NATO campaign in Yugoslavia. According to one senior serving aircrew officer, US and German aircrew fired around 100 HARMs at a particular Yugoslavian target without success. It may be exaggeration, but word on the Web is that the HARM is nowadays quite easy to spoof. The ALARM did much better, but it may have been compromised as one has been captured intact after having failed to self-destruct. Times are tough for anti-radar missiles…

Just because anti-radar missiles are nowadays easy to spoof and still expensive to boot, doesn’t mean that the need for SEAD has gone away. So how is the French air force going to handle that problem ? The answer might lie in the AASM, a French precision-guided munition developed by Sagem and combined with Spectra, the very underrated integrated defensive aids suite developed by Thales for the Dassault Rafale. I just learned about that combination today and what I read on page seven of this November 2009 electronic warfare newsletter is impressive… But since it is in French I’m going to translate and adapt the relevant part for you :

The proposed concept is based on :

- Identification of the approximate coordinates of the fire control vehicles, using previous reconnaissance or on-board sensors such as the Rafale’s Spectra

- Automated target acquisition in terminal phase: even with imprecise initial designation, the IR sensor aboard the AASM enables precise impact on a non-moving vehicle.

Two engagement methods are available, according to range :

- Against short and medium range systems, the scenario that takes best advantage of the AASM’s capabilities is to locate it approximately using the Spectra. Then, as soon as sufficient location precision has been obtained, an AASM may be fired and forgotten – even at off-boresight angles.

- Against long range systems, low altitude long distance approach using terrain masking is preferred and initial target acquisition by a third party is necessary. The launch sequence is then identical to the other scenario.

No costly and spoofable seeker is required. With a 250 kg munition, the AASM carries three to five times as much explosives as dedicated anti-radar missiles, and airburst makes the most of the fragmentation pattern.

Near-vertical terminal course enhances precision by making errors in the estimation of target altitude much less relevant – an important factor since radio-goniometry’s altitude estimates are much less precise than its measurements in the horizontal plane.

In the future, the IR seeker may transmit terminal target acquisition images to the launching aircraft, thus providing instant improvement in battle damage assessment.

Exploiting mostly existing capabilities of the Rafale and of the AASM, the SEAD mission would once more demonstrate the system’s flexibility.

Now, that article was written by someone from the AASM program at Sagem, so the careful reader might want to discount part of the performance boasts as infomercial propaganda… But if even is just some of it is true, then France is actually taking the lead in a new generation of SEAD capabilities. Nevertheless, this wonderful piece of kit has never been involved in anything more taxing than gunboat diplomacy and neo-colonial policing on the coattails of the USA… No one will believe it works until it is proven in combat against more substantial adversaries. And most important, I have not found confirmation that the SEAD capability of the Rafale+AASM combo has reach operational status.

The AASM itself though has seen action in Afghanistan – so we know it works. Considering that each AASM costs 143k€ and that each Rafale flight hour costs 37k€, the critics humorously calculated that it won’t take that many insurgents for the French state to go broke on bombing budget alone… But we suspect that the real point of using fancy pants Rafale with AASM instead of plain old  Mirage 2000 with laser guided bombs is that someone wanted to put the “combat proven” sticker on it to flog it on the international market. With that perspective and Nicolas Sarkozy’s track record of colluding with powerful commercial players, it is easy to imagine a Libyan campaign as a sales demonstration – but of course that would be gross oversimplification : Sarkozy’s diplomatic bet on the protesters for post-revolutionary benefits if not innocent either, but it is a much more serious matter… Though it mostly caters to the same interests.

YGTBSM you say ? We may now need a French word for that undomesticated carnivorous furry little mustelidae…

The Economist’s Democracy Index 2010 ranks France as a “flawed democracy” with a score below South Africa and Italy.

“France — full democracy to flawed democracy

Various negative political trends in France in recent years have resulted in the country being downgraded to the flawed democracy category. Public confidence in political parties and the government is extremely low. Surveys also show that citizens’ engagement with politics has declined. The degree of popular support for democracy is among the lowest in the developed world. One in seven do not agree that democracy is better than any other form of government. The chasm between the country’s citizens and its political elites has widened. Outbreaks of violent rioting in recent years are another symptom of the country’s political malaise. Under the French political system, the president wields huge power. The autocratic and domineering style of the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, threatens to undermine democratic traditions. There has been increasing anti-Muslim sentiment and emphasis on the country’s Christian roots during the Sarkozy presidency. Pressure on journalists and the electronic media have led to a decline in media freedoms”.

No need to comment – The Economist’s analysis speaks for itself and I believe it does reflect the situation of my country. What is a French citizen to do ?

In troubled times and under pressure from a government with powerful social networking analysis capabilities, the mere preliminary act of searching for co-conspirators and linking with them carries a lot of risk. Care in maintaining a anonymity reduces that risk, but the proper use of secure online communication tools is cumbersome, their use itself hints at subversive activity and the anonymous procurement of devices and mobile telephony accounts is yet another drag on the enthusiastic would-be clandestine operator.

In summary, proper risk mitigation techniques are beyond the casual level acceptable for fomenting mass action. As a result, frustrated citizens rising up fall back on existing social networks that were not designed for that purpose. The use of family relationships is the archetypal example though a dangerous one: even  if your government does not emulate Stalin by deporting your entire family after suspecting a single member, it makes tracing very easy using genealogy software as was the case during the USian occupation of Iraq. What is needed is an organization which is more distributed and capable of achieving critical mass fast.

This week, Algeria’s Football Federation has called off a planned friendly with neighbours Tunisia under the rather difficult to believe pretext that “the only two stadiums capable of hosting the match are both unavailable”. The real reason is actually the wave of massive protests that is currently rocking the Middle East. But what does football have to do with it ?

Paul Woodward reports an interview by the prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah on Al Jazeera in which he made the interesting observation that the uprising’s most effective organizational strength comes from a quarter that has been ignored by most of the media: soccer fans known as ultras :

“The ultras — the football fan associations — have played a more significant role than any political group on the ground at this moment,” Alaa said. “Maybe we should get the ultras to rule the country,” he joked.

Cited by Paul Woodward, James M. Dorsey, an expert on soccer in the Middle East, writes:

Established in 2007, the ultras—modelled on Italy’s autonomous, often violent fan clubs—have proven their mettle in confrontations with the Egyptian police, who charge that criminals and terrorists populate their ranks.

“There is no competition in politics, so competition moved to the soccer pitch. We do what we have to do against the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong,” said an El Ahly ultra last year after his group overran a police barricade trying to prevent it from bringing flares, fireworks and banners into the stadium. “You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We’re not political, the government knows that and has to deal with us,” he adds.

The involvement of organized soccer fans in Egypt’s anti-government protests constitutes every Arab government’s worst nightmare. Soccer, alongside Islam, offers a rare platform in the Middle East, a region populated by authoritarian regimes that control all public spaces, for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration.

This has not escaped Libya either, as this Google Translation excerpt of an Al Jazeera article mentioned by Zero Hedge attests : among other measures that are part of the state of emergency and security alert imposed since the outbreak of the revolution in Tunisia, the Libyan government abolished the league matches of Libyan Football Association which was to be organized during the following month.

When political organizations are crushed and political life driven underground and dispersed, only apolitical organizations remain – and they end up being politically involved because in the end, everything is political.

Bruce Sterling just wrote a wonderful melancholic essay on cypherpunks, Wikileaks, Julian Assange and the human society that forms their milieu. It may be the best piece so far to capture the character of Julian Assange.

Glancing over the comments, I stopped on this one – here is an extract:

[..] the people that run the governments of the world don’t get it at all. As the old guard “nationalists” die off there will be less and less reaction to this kind of thing to the point where it’s happening so much most things are just lost in the noise. I’m younger than Bruce, but not by much, however I know this much that he doesn’t seem to, in a world where the population has grown up with Facebook/MySpace/etc there is not even the expectation of privacy or secrets. Get over it. People will again have to start actually being polite to one another, or they’ll be exposed for all to see.

Personally, I do not believe that information which is solely classified because it’s embarrassing to a government should be. I also believe that people that work for the government should be honor bound to report when crimes are being committed, and that supersedes ALL other directives. Until we reach that state we will not have grown into adults as a society. Right now governments behave as children without adults behave. Read Lord of the Flies.

I disagree with him about expectations of privacy from the Facebook generation, but the rest rings true to me. But what hit me as I read it is his remark that “Ppople will again have to start actually being polite to one another, or they’ll be exposed for all to see” : this immediately reminded me of this Heinlein quote:

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life” – Robert A. Heinlein

One may not agree with Heinlein about whether citizens bearing arms is a good idea, but the fact is that the balance of power that was previously wholly on the side of the governments has just been slightly tipped back toward the citizens.

Will that make governments more polite toward their citizens ?

Yesterday, @telecomix mentioned a statement by Trotsky about the publication of secret treaties. A few extracts :

“Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level”.

“The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents”.

“The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy”.

Sure, it is Leon Trotsky and you will discount his opinion because he carries the stigma of Communism – or Trotskyism to be more exact. So what about someone more moderate ?

What about a President of the United States ? If that could help convince you, here is Woodrow Wilson : @AymericPM dug out his Fourteen Points and guess what the first one is ?

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”.

Amen bro !

Secret diplomacy sucks – ACTA is a recent prime example of why it does. Popular reaction to the Cablegate publications shows that popular awareness of that issue is growing.

I’m sure that we can find other prominent  political thinkers who have something to say about it… We have two and I’m sure it is only the beginning of a consensus.

About the Cablegate, Defense Secretary and former director of central intelligence  Robert M. Gates declared : “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest”. Let’s contradict him : we want open diplomacy.

Post forth your quotes in support of open diplomacy !

Yesterday, sparked by a Frederick Douglass quote I stumbled upon at Reddit, I posted my spontaneous thoughts about the Wikileak Cablegate aftermath. Of course by now everyone an his dog is barking across town in delicious cacophony, so here are a few articles in that vein that I liked today.

“How to think about Wikileaks” is a compendium of analysis and reactions that has been widely pointed at. If you don’t know where to start, this is a very good place with choice quotes from interesting voices from all round. Among them, Cintra Wilson’s “The C Word: Julian Assange Isn’t Doing Anything Worse Than What Our Government Is Doing” rang particularly well within me.

Apart from that, I liked this piece from Broadstuff, found through the incredible Glyn Moody : Wikileaks only exists because the mainstream media failed. Here in France I’m pleasantly surprised to have seen Le Monde be one of the five media anchors in the world to collaborate on the Cablegate release – this surely has something to do with its new rebellious ownership. Not to be outdone, the left-leaning Liberation is now hosting a Wikileaks mirror – of course I’m not holding my breath for Le Figaro to do anything. But even Le Monde has only caught the Wikileaks wave, not created it. Journalists used to be the conduit for leaking information – where are they now ?

By the way, Aavaaz petition in support of Wikileaks is past 530k signatures – 300k in past 24 hours. Let’s get it past a million, just in case whoever cluelessly keeps attempting a clumsy crackdown has not got the message yet…

A disturbing number of people around me have expressed misgivings about Wikileak’s disorderly conduct, claiming that progress must be achieved in a more civilized way within the frame of the established government system. Alas, that is not always possible – sometimes a measure of peaceful excess is required to nudge the system out of a local optimum toward the great wide open of better possibilities. To illustrate that, here are a few choice quotes from someone who broke his chains and helped in freeing others from theirs:

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” – Frederick Douglass in an address on West India Emancipation (1857-08-04)

If you don’t ask for something, the odds of receiving it are tiny – especially when subjected to more powerful forces. The people have been clamoring for honesty from those who govern them, and not getting it. Now they begin to understand that a struggle is required – and they chose information as their weapon.

The people seeks truth as authority, not authority as truth. But Wikileaks is not about the abstract and impossible absolute transparency – the strawman argument derided by those who oppose it. It is about more transparency in response to a problem : we don’t trust our governments anymore.

Or course, Wikileaks is clearly excessive – but it is only the backlash for the equally excessive treachery that secretive governments have foisted upon their own people.

More balanced views will prevail, but only when trust will have been re-established. Until then, there will be struggle :

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe” – Frederick Douglass in speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

It remains that whereas governments have been used to the privilege of surveillance over subjects – they are now waking up to a new world of sousveillance, where citizens forcefully take back rightful lordship over their government.

Wikileaks has contributed to the exposure of how broken the covenant between the people and the governments currently is. That covenant will be renewed : the truth that is pouring out of the shadows is the source of hope that will feed it.

“When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world” – Frederick Douglass in in speech to the International Council of Women (31 March 1888)

The discussion is now open – more information cures all !

Thanks to Frederick Douglass for the inspiration – the Wikileaks affair underlines the timelessness of his writings.

Evil implies that corporations can be judged as humans, but they are not : corporations are just soulless. They knows neither right nor wrong. By definition, a corporation exists merely as a maximization function toward the goals of its shareholders. That is why, in spite of having legal personality, corporations cannot exist in the political sphere that holds control and oversight in the name of the public good – though the extent to which the financial resources of corporations are employed to influence political campaigns shows how poorly that separation of power is applied.

Charles Stross’ Accelerando is heavily loaded with buzzwords – though it is a fun read and a great reflection on post-humanity. Among the interesting concepts that pepper the story, I found the “Turing-complete company constitution” – if you have legal personality, then why not Turing completeness ? And then why not go all the way to human-equivalent sentience and cognitive abilities or better ? You may, but it won’t matter because whatever their sophistication, corporations have a mandate inscribed in their lowest level code that merely makes them paperclip maximizers.

Whether you consider them anthropomorphic artificial intelligences or just really powerful optimization processes, corporations don’t care about you anyway. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky : they don’t hate you, nor do they love you – you just happen to be resources that they can use for something else.

Guillaume Esquelisse tipped me about an interesting discussion arising from Andy Grove’s article on the need for US job creation and industrial policy, which highlights the relationship between innovation,manufacturing and trade. Rajiv Sethi summarized its central point : “An economy that innovates prolifically but consistently exports its jobs to lower cost overseas locations will eventually lose not only its capacity for mass production, but eventually also its capacity for innovation“.

Unlike some of the commentators of Tim Duy’s article, I’m not one of those heretics who openly toy with protectionist ideas as a protection against the shameless exploiters of the international trade system. But as Tim Duy warns : “if you scream ‘protectionist fool’ in response, then you need to have a viable policy alternative that goes beyond the empty rhetoric“. So here is a proposal.

I believe that the fix does not lie in the selfish tweaking of trade barriers – that is merely treating a symptom. We need to act much deeper by addressing a foolishly held belief about the fundamental nature of the knowledge economy : underlying the fabless follies of glamorous captains of industry no longer worthy of the title is the fallacious narrative that applies capitalist analogies to the knowledge economy.

Knowledge cannot be hoarded. Like electricity production, knowledge creation is an online process : there are marginal hacks for storing some of it, but to benefit you must be plugged in the grid. As John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison put it : “abandon stocks, embrace flows”. Read their article and let it sink in : knowledge flows trumps knowledge stocks.

This is the same point that Mike Masnick found in Terence Kealey’s “Science is a Private Good–Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful” :

“How many people in this room can read the Journal of Molecular Biology. How many people in this room can read contemporary journals in physics? Or math? Physiology? Very, very few. Now the interesting thing — and we can show this very clearly — is that the only people who can read the papers, the only people who can talk to the scientists who generate the data, are fellow specialists in the same field. And what are they doing? They are publishing their own papers.

And if they try not to publish their own papers… If they say, ‘we’re not going to get engaged in the exchange of information; we’re going to keep out of it and just try to read other people’s papers, but not do any research of our own, not make any advances of our own, not have any conversations with anyone,’ within two or three years they are obsolescent and redundant, and they can no longer read the papers, because they’re not doing the science themselves, which gives them the tacit knowledge — all the subtle stuff that’s never actually published — that enables them actually to access the information of their competitors.”

This is a huge point that fits with similar points that we’ve made in the past when it comes to intellectual property and the idea that others can just come along and “copy” the idea. So many people believe it’s easy for anyone to just copy, but it’s that tacit knowledge that is so hard to get. It’s why so many attempts at just copying what other successful operations do turn into cargo cult copies, where you may get the outward aspects copied, but you miss all that important implicit and tacit information if you’re not out there in the market yourself.

Collecting ideas is easy, but acquiring tacit knowledge takes actual involvement. Tacit knowledge requires doing. This is quite far from being news to the practitioners of knowledge management or to anyone who has ever reflected on what internalizing knowledge actually means… But is is no longer just a self-improvement recipe nor an organizational issue : it has now acquired visibility at the national policy level.

The Chinese are not just mindlessly pillaging out intellectual property : they have also understood the systemic effects of a fluid knowledge economy – take open standards for example. We must now get on with the program and admit that the whole idea of capitalizing intelectual property is a lost cause. Political leaders will soon understand it… Patent trolls are already dead – but they just don’t know it yet.

But we have already advanced far into a de-industrialization process whose only redeeming strategic value is that the Chinese must be laughing hard enough for their gross national product to be slightly negatively affected. Is it too late ?

You may have heard that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of two characters representing “danger” and “opportunity”. Well… Forget that – it is wishful folk etymology. And next time you hear a fluffy motivational speech using this handy rhetorical device, expose the scam !

Anyway, I would love to believe that the current crisis is indeed an opportunity. European political integration has been mired in national egoism for so long that I have found myself wondering if we would ever achieve any practical degree of coordination for the things that actually matter to our sovereignty, namely defence and finances for starters.

According to a TNS-Sofres/Logica survey on 26 March 2009, 58% of French people believe that the banks bear the bulk of the responsibility for the crisis. Doesn’t everyone love to pile on the scapegoat ? Let’s get beyond that – we must take responsibility for our complacency !

Two months ago, the IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn reiterated the common wisdom that coordinated economic policy is inseparable from currency union. But so far European Union was a political project without political support. By exposing weaknesses in our institutional framework, the financial crisis may have changed that :

“I don’t like it, but it was probably the only way to force all the governments together, to have more discipline on their budgets and on their deficits and more centralised government of the eurozone”  – Yves Carcelle, Louis Vuitton’s chief executive – interviewed by the BBC.

Will it be enough to force the national governments on that common path ? As Henrik Müller writes for the Spiegel :

“If the monetary union is to survive, member states will have to abandon their egos”.

“The member states must learn to understand themselves as a community that shares a common fate and together they must strengthen democratic control over shared finances”.

Strong democratic control over our common fate… That’s my wish for Europe – a wish that some such as George Friedman greet with scepticism :

“What we have learned is that Europe is not a country. It is a region, and in this region there are nations and these nations are comprised of people united by shared history and shared fates. [..] but in the end, they share neither a common moral commitment nor a common fate”.

I disagree. We are the citizens of Europe – willingly or not we will stand or fall together. This is a common fate and it binds us together with a moral commitment toward our success as a people.

Will the politicians finally accept the need for the deeper transparency and the democracy that will empowers us ? As Dominique Strauss-Kahn told :

“20 years from now, when Europeans look back at the present period, will they see a missed opportunity ? Not to be too emphatic, but what is at stake in the current debates is simply the future of Europe”.

Twenty years is not even what it will take us to repay our irresponsible debts… Lean years are ahead of us – let’s make them count toward a better future for us, as the people of the European Union.

Stéphane Richard, chief executive at France Telecom, argued recently : “There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let Google use our network without paying the price”. I could barely control my hilarity.

But wait, there’s more :

Telefonica chairman Cesar Alierta said Google should share some of its online advertising revenue with carriers to compensate them for the billions of euros they are investing in fixed-line and mobile infrastructure to increase download speeds and network capacity. Alierta said that regulators should step in to supervise a settlement if no revenue sharing deal was possible between search engines led by Google and network operators. France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard said, “Today, there is a winner who Google. There are victims that are content providers, and to a certain extent, network operators. We cannot accept this”. Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann stated, “There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service. We cannot offer our networks for free”.

Whiners ! France Telecom, Telefonica and Deutsch Telekom are all historical monopoly operators that suffered the full impact of the internetworking revolution. It took them a while to realize that the good old times were gone for good, but I thought that with a good help of new blood they had reluctantly adapted to the new reality. Apparently I was wrong : in spite of  a decades long track record of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, executives at the incumbent club keep fantasizing about the pre-eminence of intelligent networks and how they somehow own the user. Of course I would not tax them with sheer stupidity - they are anything but stupid. This is rather a case of gross hypocrisy serving a concerted lobbying effort. And maybe after all they end up believing their own propaganda.

Users pay Internet access providers for – guess what – Internet Access. And most providers are very happy for their Internet access to do exactly what it says on the tin while they get well earned monies in exchange. Only a few of them have the political clout necessary for this blatant attempt at distorting competition – they are trying to leverage it but they will fail, again like they failed to stop local loop unbundling.

Ultimately, if large operators across Europe make a foolish coordinated move against Google, it will look suspiciously like a cartel. You can play that game with the national governments, but you definitely don’t want to do that in view of the European Comissionner for Competition.

Since Google is in the crosshair, I’ll let them have the last word :

— Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users, cited by the Wikipedia article on Network Neutrality.

Update : I am far from the only one to feel slack-jawed astonishment at that shocking display of hypocrisy. From the repeating-something-relentlessly-does-not-make-it-true dept, Karl Bode at Techdirt published “Telcos Still Pretending Google Gets Free Ride”. You’ll find comments and more context there.

« Aliens from the communist planet of Rooskee are invading peaceful, democratic planets and turning their inhabitants into “Communist Mutants”. The communist mutant armies are controlled by the Mother Creature, a strange alien who has gone mad due to irradiated vodka. »

Is this real ? Is this really the synopsis for a 1982 computer game ? Wikipedia and various other sources agree that Communist Mutants from Space really did exist. I did not have the privilege of playing it on my Atari 2600 at the time – and somehow I’m glad that the Cold War propaganda we were exposed to did not go to such baroque lengths…

Stéphane Bortzmeyer has a very long track record of interesting commentary about the Internet – his blog goes back to 1996. Its a pity that my compatriot doesn’t write in English more often: I believe he would find a big audience for his excellent articles. But as he told me : “Many people write in English already, English readers do not need one more writer”. I object – there is always room for good information to be brought to a greater audience. And since his writings are licensed under the GFDL, I’ll do the translation myself when I feel like it.

Maybe this will be the only of his articles I translate – or maybe there will be others in the future… Meanwhile here is this one. I chose it because DNS hijacking is a subject I am sensitive about – and maybe because of the exoticism of Chinese shenanigans…

---

Before reading this interesting article, please heed this forewarning : as soon as we talk about China, we should admit our ignorance. Most people who pontificate about the state of the Internet in China do not speak Chinese – their knowledge of the country stops at the doorstep of international hotels in Beijing and Shanghai. The prize for the most ludicrous pro-Chinese utterance goes to the Jacques Myard, representative at the National Assembly and member of the UMP party, for his support for the Chinese dictatorship [translator's note : he went on the record saying that "the Internet is utterly rotten" and went on to say that it "should be nationalized to give us better control - the Chinese did it"]. When it comes to DNS, one of the least understood Internet services, the bullshit production rate goes up considerably and sentences where both « DNS » and « China » occur are most likely to be false.

I am therefore going to try not emulating Myard, and only talk about what I know, which will make this article quite short and full of conditional. Unlike criminal investigations in US movies, this article will name no culprit and you won’t even know if there was really a crime.

DNS root servers hijacking for the purpose of implementing the policy (notably censorship) of the Chinese dictatorship has been discussed several times – for example at the 2005 IETF meeting in Paris. It is very difficult to know exactly what happens in China because Chinese users, for cultural reasons, but mostly for fear of repression, don’t provide much information. Of course, plenty of people travel to China, but few of them are DNS experts and it is difficult to get them to provide data from mtr or dig correctly executed with the right options. Reports on censorship in China are often poor in technical detail.

However, from time to time, DNS hijacking in China has visible consequences outside of Chinese territory. On the 24th March, the technical manager for the .cl domain noted that root server I, anycast and managed by Netnod, answered bizarrely when queried from Chile :

$ dig @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P3 <<>> @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 7448
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.facebook.com.              IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.facebook.com.       86400   IN      A       8.7.198.45

;; Query time: 444 msec
;; SERVER: 192.36.148.17#53(192.36.148.17)
;; WHEN: Wed Mar 24 14:21:54 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 66

[translator's note : sign of the times, the Chilean administrator chose to query facebook.com - google.com and, before that, microsoft.com used to be classic example material Mauricio used facebook.com (or twitter.com) because it is hijacked by the chinese govt, unlike microsoft.com (or even google.com)]

The root servers are not authoritative for facebook.com. The queried server should therefore have answered with a pointer to the .com domain. Instead, we find an unknown IP address. Someone is screwing with the server’s data :

• The I root server’s administrators as well as its hosts deny any modifications of the data obtained from VeriSign (who manages the DNS root master server).
• Other root servers (except, oddly, D) are also affected.
• Only UDP traffic is hijacked – TCP is unaffected. Traceroute sometimes ends up at reliable instances of the I server (for example, in Japan) which seem to suggest that the manipulation only affects port 53 – the one used by the DNS.
• Affected names are those of services censored in China, such as Facebook or Twitter. They are censored not just for political reasons, but also because they compete with Chinese interests.

If you want to check it yourself, 123.123.123.123 is hosted by China Unicom and will let you resolve a name :

% dig A www.facebook.com @123.123.123.123 

; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> A www.facebook.com @123.123.123.123
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44684
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.facebook.com.              IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.facebook.com.       86400   IN      A       37.61.54.158

;; Query time: 359 msec
;; SERVER: 123.123.123.123#53(123.123.123.123)
;; WHEN: Fri Mar 26 10:46:52 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 66

37.61.54.158 is a currently unassigned address and it does not belong to Facebook. [translator's note : I get 243.185.187.39 which is also abnormal]

It is therefore very likely that rogue root servers exist in China and that Chinese ISP have hacked their IGP (OSPF for example) to hijack traffic bound toward the root servers. This does not quite explain everything – for example why the known good instances installed in China still see significant traffic. But it won’t be possible to know more without in-depth testing from various locations in China. A leak from this routing hack (similar to what affected YouTube in 2008) certainly explains how the announcement from the rogue server reached Chile.

« The Great DNS Wall of China » and « Report about national DNS spoofing in China » are among the reliable sources of information about manipulated DNS in China.

For more information about the problem described in this article, you may also read « China censorship leaks outside Great Firewall via root server » (a good technical  article), « China’s Great Firewall spreads overseas » or « Web traffic redirected to China in mystery mix-up ».

This article is distributed under the terms of the GFDL. The original article was published on Stéphane Bortzmeyer’s blog on the 26 March 2010 and translated by Jean-Marc Liotier the same day.