From a horse to an ass – English law and order today

 Jon Snow, News International, phone-hacking, Rebekah Brooks, smoke and mirrors, subversion, Tom Watson, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Feb 282012
 

I’d be inclined to think we should look a gift horse in the mouth – at least today.

It started off this morning with a story which appeared absolutely incredible.  Apparently, the Metropolitan Police is in the habit of lending its older horses to those who might be able to keep them.  In this case, Rebekah Brooks of News International fame.  As Tom Watson tweeted:

At least the horse’s head didn’t end up in my bed! http://t.co/UfwsVlmY Unbelievable. Quite unbelievable.

But later on, the suspicion arises that the timing of this juicy but relatively trivial piece of news has just been one massive exercise in smoke and mirrors.  The really big news has come from a quite different quarter – the Leveson inquiry and the declarations of a certain WPC.  The declarations first:

Do read para 40 of police officer Jacqui Hames’s #Leveson statement on surveillance:

“The News of the World has never supplied a coherent explanation for why we were placed under surveillance. Ill 2003, David, together with Dick Fedorcio and Colnmander Andre Baker, met Rebekah Brooks to discuss the matter.

“She repeated the unconvincing explanation that the News of the World believed we were having an affair. She agreed to iook into Alex Marunchak’s associations with Rees and Fillery but to my knowledge nothing further was ever said about the subject, indeed Mr Marunchak was subsequently promoted.

“I believe that the real reason for the News of the World placing us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation.”

As Jon Snow commented on his Twitter feed this afternoon:

Devatstating testimony from former WPC Jackie Haymes to Leveson: NOW subversion of a murder investigation? http://t.co/UjTxhaeM

Which brings me to my final piece of comment picked up from the ether:

#Leveson: Police collusion with NOTW to subvert murder inquiry. Met: HORSE! HORSE HORSE HORSE, LOOK AT THE HORSE! Murdoch: *silence*

If the above sequence of events is really how it has happened, and underlying it all is really a case of smoke and mirrors as already described, then it’s not just an old story about the alleged subversion of a murder inquiry but an absolutely hot potato of current news management.

By the police.

By certain parts of the media.

By the Lord only knows who else.

On how to launch paper-based DoS attacks (and, more importantly, why …)

 a con, astroturfing, Census, in a hole, Lockheed Martin, paper-based DoS attacks, subversion  13 Responses »
Apr 042011
 

Tom makes some interesting points on my recent post on subverting the census.  Interestingly, Google’s spam filter prevented the comments from being posted immediately.  Was this simply because they made reference to “astroturfing” or was it for some entirely deeper and darker reason?

Either way, I’ll reproduce them in full here:

There is more about the Peace News blog saga than meets the eye and which could lead to several new lines of enquiry and discussion.

1) Yesterday evening I searched the phrase “How to fill in your census form without Lockheed” and got about 30,000 hits. (for reasons which I do not understand at all, the number of hits you get is sometimes much less, sometimes not, in such a search)

2) Here is a link to an article which looks in a technical way at it as a new type of protest action:

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/comment/census-threatened-with-paper-dos-attack-24945.

3) Here is a blog with comments on the subject of “astroturfing” (i.e. fake posts by PR operators)in relation to the Peace News blog:

http://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/the-census-and-your-activist-sensibilities/

3) Finally, as far as I can find out there has been not one word in the print media about it all. They only discussed the issue in terms of the – my opinion false – choice between compliance and boycot. It would surely now be quite safe to report on something which has already happened and is fully in the public domain. Should I find this odd?

Thus I do wonder, if only for an idle and light-hearted second, whether, on this occasion, Google’s spam filter filtered spam or served, rather more darkly, to filter arguments which must not be countenanced.

Anyhow, Tom continues his pursuit of what would appear to be a rather cack-handed astroturfing commenter here.  Again, I’ll reproduce in full what both have to say on the subject.  First the alleged astroturfer:

The flaw with this being, Lockheed Martin do not process the forms. All they did was create the tracking system. Their job is done, dusted, and paid for. Lockheed Martin do not and will not see your completed forms. hey go to the ONS in Manchester for processing! By creating more work, you are making the census more expensive overall, and where do you suppose the money comes from to pay for this? Personally I prefer to take the ten mins it takes to fill it in, post it back, and never be bothered by it again… at least not for a decade.

I must laugh at this idea to deliberately make the paper un-scannable by the software. Many people have a problem with the fact that their personal information is being recorded. Besides the obvious point that all this info and much much more is readily available to the government if they really wanted it, by writing badly and forcing a human to manually type in your details, well then your details will be seen. If you write legibly and allow the software to do its job, no one need see your personal details at all.

Oh and on another note, if only for example 80% of people in your district return the forms, the local council, schooling, healthservice, libraries and all other public sector services, will only receive 80% of the funding they are entitled to… so if you failed to return your form, think twice before you complain about the state of your roads or the closure of your local library!

Lastly, a friend of mine is working for the census this year, and her fear is that people will be rude and aggresive towards her when she makes calls to collect their forms. If you do happen to be contacted by Census workers, do remember they work for the ONS, not Lockheed, nor the government, so be civil!

Now Tom’s response:

A comment about Ker’s post. Forgive me for the length of what follows. It is important, but there is a lot to it. Ker’s post seems a bit incoherent and doesn’t actually address the issue properly. I first saw this post on the Peace News blog, and found it a bit odd, so I investigated. I followed all the links of people who posted comments and Ker’s identical post turned up everywhere, sometimes under another name. At that pount, a little alarm bell rung: I had heard of fake posts, by PR agencies on behalf of commercial or political interests. This is one of them, but not as subtle as I would have expected.

We are dealing here with something called “astroturfing”. Below are 2 links to explain in much greater detail what this means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing

Basically, the PR industry has discovered that you can influence opinion by internet infiltration of discussion forums etc. by imeans of inserting fake comments which look as if they are made by real people. This is dangerous, because it can be effective. Yesterday I met someone who was actually taken in by some of those on the Peace News blog (there are several ones now). This particular one (Ker’s) is a primitive and unsophisticated one, which laboriously tracked links by hand. I searched, and found that it did not get all that far. I ran also a very simple check: put a characteristic phrase, with an oddly placed comma: “The flaw with this being, Lockheed” in the Google Advanced Search option of “this exact wording or phrase”, but no new ones turned up in addition to the ones I had al ready found.
I think that the reason why there are not many more and much more sophisticated “astroturf” posts relating to the census and the Lockheed Martin contract is that there has been so little time between the date of the Peace news Blog (21 march) and the census date (27 March). The moment has long passed that anyone can do anything about it anymore. But, from point of view of Lockheed Martin, the stakes are very high indeed.

In terms of the company’s overall turnover, the UK census contract may be small beer, but they also run the census contracts for the USA. Currently (May this year) they are the contractors for the Canadian census (links with details below). With all those similar contracts in the English speaking world, it is beginnning to add up. Even that aspect of their operations is no doubt quite small compared with their arms business, but it has an all-inportant function: such civilian work “cleans up” their brand image, i.e. it helps to legitimise the company. If the Peace News blog had appeared earlier, they would have had much more time to act on it and we might have seen a barrage of astroturfing and other obstructive and disinformation techniques. They were really caught on the hop (no mean feat by a few peaceniks againts a MASSIVE U.S. arms company – the largest in the world, I believe)

The implication for internet social network sites is basically that as long as they deal with matters which do not threaten big vested interests, they will be left alone. As soon as they happen to hit upon something big, they become an astroturfing target. In a sense it is nothing new: everybody in the Westen capitalist world grows up with advertising and opinion- manipulating messages all round him/her as a natural environment. We have learned to ignore it all by and large. From the advertising poster to the tupperware party and then to astroturfing is a process of refinement by the PR industry to reach people at a more and more personal level, which will never stop. But on the internet, it will take us a bit of time to learn to deal with it, for it contaminates open and democratic sites.

This is in a sense a science fiction world. When you encounter an astroturfer you are basically dealing with a robot – or an android – a manufactured, non-human entity. I know of 2 ways to catch them out.
1) The “Techie” way: you try to track down URL and servers to find the source. This will get harder and harder as the astroturf techniques develop. (I am not a techie and leave it to others to work on this)
2) The “Humanist” way: you detect the absence of truly human spontaneity, feeling and thought. There is a certain Dalek quality about the astroturfer (Yes, media studies at Uni and education in literature and poetry are important!). There is a clear economic dimension to it. You can’t cheaply mass-produce spontanous human speech and thought: it would be prohibitively expensive to try it. I firmly believe that this is a boundary the PR industry cannot cross. Authenticity is always hand-made and thus expensive. If it feels wrong, check it out. Everybody who writes has a “signature” he or she is not really aware of: a certain mannerism, a characteristic spelling or typing error, a recurring stock phrase, and so on. If you home in on those, you can trace astroturf posts even if they are cleverly changing (i.e. mutating) between one post and the next.

I am a 61 years old computer dinosaur, and I am new to all this myself. Please take it away, improve it, and help to educate others. This is the new internet world which is now taking shape.

Here are the promised links for the Lockheed Martin Canadian census contract (their census is next month, in May):

http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/gen/private-sect-prive-eng.cfm

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23342

And here is a good Canadian protest site:

http://home.primus.ca/~donrogers/cmo/mincoop/other_options.html

Please tell your Canadian friends and relatives about it.

I have to say when I first read the Peace News Blog “rebuttals” (here and here in particular), my response was as follows:

[...] I have to say that when I first read the rebuttal on Peace News via the comments section, it did strike me as a little strange. Couldn’t put my finger on it – but something didn’t ring quite right. As if a temp would poke his or her head over the parapet to defend their short-term employer …

Whilst this example of someone wanting without ulterior motive to “tell the other side of the story” was practically a press release.

Finally, whilst the massive silence from mainstream media in relation to the alleged links Lockheed Martin has with the more unsavoury underbellies of international relations definitely begs questions, especially as the biggest question of all – why any government should choose an arms manufacturer to process a census in the first place – doesn’t seem to be getting an airing anywhere, we come across these paragraphs and conclusion from one of the reports Tom links to in one of his comments, on the subject of what those of us who care enough about these things could do in the future:

A blueprint for paper-based protests

What we have here is a blueprint for future protests that could exploit the mismatch between online and paper-based services. It isn’t really a denial of service (DoS) attack, of course, as the aim is not to deny anyone access to the service.

The authorities should be worried about this sort of thing, as the current situation, with incomplete computer penetration and a mismatch between the costs of online and paper, make the danger almost unavoidable.

There may be an indication of worry from Lockheed or the authorities: amongst the comments to Peace News’ article there is one supposedly from someone employed by Lockheed to process forms, saying “census workers earn a flat rate no matter how much work we have to do. So all that extra processing work? It doesn’t cost the arms manufacturer guy a penny while I have a shitload more work to do for nothing.”

However, census workers’ terms of employment are published and they are on an hourly rate – other commenters see this as a “Lockheed plant”.

If so, then it could be that people are starting to worry about this mode of protest. 

So.  If you want to subvert a government which wishes to drive its policy-making via a huge virtualisation of data collection, the easiest thing you can do is to take advantage of and deliberately deepen the digital divide by reversing the process – and demanding paper-based application forms for this, that and almost anything you have to provide in the future.

With the added advantage of it being entirely legal – and, what’s more important, entirely legal for the foreseeable future …

Unless, of course, Lockheed Martin, the government and perhaps even my beloved Google know something completely different.

On subversion, the census and the privatisation of our national psyche

 a con, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, George Osborne, NHS cuts, subversion  6 Responses »
Mar 202011
 

There’s a massive blogpost over at Peace News Log providing extremely detailed information on how to legally subvert the census process – a process which is on the point of kicking in here in Britain.  Let it be clear: by linking to this site, I’m not proposing one should avoid completing the census: that would lead to fines and a criminal record, and none of us really want that for anyone.  But then Peace News Log is just as clear about this very issue at the start of the post:

Lots of people are angry that the UK Census has, once again, been awarded to blood-soaked arms dealer Lockheed Martin. The following anonymous article sent to PN explains how you can fill in your Census form without benefiting Lockheed Martin or creating funding problems for local authorities.

(Updated as at 18-03-2011)

US Arms Manufacturer Lockheed Martin has the contract for the 2011 UK Census in March this year.

The arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin US makes Trident nuclear missiles, cluster bombs and fighter jets and is involved in data processing for the CIA and FBI. It has provided private contract interrogators for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Lockheed Martin has the UK Government contract to collect the process the data for the 2011 census in March. (Observer, 20 February 2011)

If you do not complete the census form and answer all the questions (except “religion”), (or return this information on line) you could get fined £1000 and a get criminal record. The Green Party has, after some real soul searching, decided not to promote a boycott of the 2011 census after all because that could lead to further funding problems for local authorities. The census data are used to determine the financial needs of councils on the basis of the population data for their area.

An almost insoluble situation, then. Almost – but not quite:

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Lockheed Martin is in it for the money. A principled stance by you to boycott the census will not hurt them, could provide the British Government with £1000 of your money and will make life harder for local authorities. The rational approach would be to take part in the census but make processing your return as expensive to process as possible for Lockheed Martin. Make sure that processing your return costs Lockheed Martin more that they allowed for in their tender. Don’t let them make a profit from your census return but do help to provide the data your council needs for its Government grants.

The post then goes on to explain how to do just that.  It makes interesting reading – and shows the resilience and ingenuity of the highly principled in the face of impossibly conscience-debilitating situations.

So all this explains why people should wish to subvert the census.  Lockheed Martin has the contract to develop the data systems used – and Lockheed Martin is clearly an arms dealer.  But then I might say, in true “whaddabouters” style, that most large companies these days will have been touched in some way or another by the long arm of dubious and unethical industry. 

And then I might point out that military intervention in for example countries like Libya – or, indeed, closer to my heart, that part of the world we chose at the time to call the Balkans – would’ve been impossible without these “blood-soaked arms dealers”.

To be honest, what upsets me most about these kinds of issues – issues we will experience more and more in the sort of privatising futures this Coalition government promises us – is not that foreign companies will play hard and fast with our private data but, rather, that no British company can be found to help the government do the jobs which manifestly need doing.  It almost seems as if the great American empire – with its logjams in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its grand 21st century experiment in terminating history as empty now of real achievement as it ever was hollow of rhetoric – has suddenly realised that without a vigorous conceptual colonisation of erstwhile partners, this roadshow of theirs would quickly reach its end.

They can’t any more beat the rest of the world fair and square – not even in that curiously half-baked fair-and-squareness of earlier epochs.  So, instead, they need to extend their influences through the kind of political lobbying we’re now suffering from which leads us to the wholesale privatisation of entire nation states.  If Iraq was an example of going to war to make money for the corporations (and I’m still not entirely sure it was necessarily the complete story), then, arguably, Britain post-2010 general election is an example of how to leech money out of the United Kingdom by destroying those state-run things which used to give people confidence in the future (the NHS, free education, a promise of a better life for one’s children) – and, essentially for the benefit of an American economy stuttering and stumbling its way forwards in a far more complex century than the 20th ever proved to be, creating an infrastructure of unlimited private power where before public checks and balances always seemed generally to prevail.

And it does really occur to me that this is not the privatisation of our public services at all.  Rather, it is the privatisation of our entire national psyche.

On creating a coalition to fight the Coalition

 Coalition, Cold War, hawks and doves, in a hole, Labour, Labour leadership campaign, subversion  No Responses »
Sep 222010
 

Paul and Tom are right.  We need to keep the communication lines open.  We need to appeal to others.

Now that the Labour leadership election is over, this curious phoney war – where the only people able to do any useful attacking (and that in a generally coded internecine fashion) were the candidates themselves – will also shortly consume itself.  In a sense, what we have had over the past four months is a kind of honeymoon of Obama-like proportions.  The Coalition government has had its ups and downs but Labour has had no real focus point around which to congregate.  On the other hand, the fact that there has been no real focus point has meant that the evil part of the newspaper industry (to use a Reaganesque adjective) has simply failed to throw any lasting punches.  Whilst you’ve still not got a leader, it all seems so irrelevant.  You can continue to mean anything and everything to every man and woman. 

Which I guess is what happened to Obama.  It can’t be all that difficult to gather around you the lashing forces of dissatisfaction when your message is simply “Let’s get them out!”.  It must be far more difficult, however, to keep your rainbow coalition together once the process of definition begins.  Once, that is, the choices begin to close down your options and freedoms to appeal emotionally to all and sundry.

Thus it is that here in Britain the progressive side of the political spectrum has had an easy ride during this Labour leadership campaign.  Unfortunately, as Obama has shown, the job of opposition and then getting elected to office does not necessarily require the same skills as that of government itself.

It will soon be the turn of the British Labour Party to go through this process of definition.  The newspaper industry, that evil part I mentioned, will be looking to fire off the first salvos as it attempts to caricature whichever candidate comes first, in the hope that – through some Pavlovian process of squalid parental imprinting – the first impression serves to negatively define the next five years of Coalition opposition.

But as Paul and Tom indicate, what we – now in opposition – must all be conscious of is that the country demands a coalition to fight the Coalition.  And that coalition must be built on a recognition of plurality, of sense and sensibility.

I’m not only talking about an internal coalition within the Labour Party itself – though the Lord only knows how difficult this has sometimes been to achieve.  I’m also talking about reaching proactively out to people and organisations one might not normally wish or aim to be associated with.

There are plenty of people inside the two political parties now in government who will tell you privately what they dare not say in public.

I’m not suggesting it is now our task to prise them away from their natural homes but, rather, that we should understand how our message must be wrought to allow them to bring pressure to bear on their own political colleagues.

I mentioned a while ago that the Coalition would recreate the poison of the Cold War.  In some smaller and more parochial way of course.

I think this is true.  I think that too many people in both the Tory Party and the Lib Dems are now going through a process of hiding away in the privacy of their own homes and families pronouncements and beliefs they will not be able to make public.  The cruel dynamic of “you’re either with us or against us” will dominate political discourse on the right of the political spectrum for many years to come.  Perhaps not their bloggers or writers, who – thankfully – have always shown a penchant for the maverick.  But, certainly, in local and backbench politics such an atmosphere can only begin to prevail.

So where should the coalition we create to fight the Coalition stand in relation to all of this?  Arguably, tendentiously perhaps, in the context of a desire to subvert.  Yes.  You heard me right.  Constitutionally of course, but with an absolute clarity of purpose.

A casual talent for oppression – which, in its obfuscation and pretty words this Coalition has in those industrial quantities I think I heard referred to yesterday – needs to be recognised for what it is from the start.  Only if we manage to generate our own caricature from that start can we hope to have any chance of convincing our coalition to be anything more than a rainbow.

This is the Cold War Part II then?  You better believe it.  Time to play “hunt the dove, fight the hawk”.

For understanding it thus and where politics will lead us will then allow us to acquire a road map of formidable proportions.

A road map I’m pretty sure we are going to need over the next five years.