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Jihad via PSP

Gamers quibble over trees while missing a forest:

Was an elite congressional intelligence committee shown video footage from an off-the-shelf retail game and told by the Pentagon and a highly-paid defense contractor that it was a jihadist creation designed to recruit and indoctrinate terrorists?

It’s looking more and more like that is the case.

The bizarre story began to unfold last week when Reuters reported that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was shown video footage of combat action which was represented as a user-modified version (or “mod”) of Electronic Art’s best-selling Battlefield 2, a modern-day military simulation which features combat between U.S. forces and those of the fictitious Middle East Coalition (MEC) as well as the People’s Republic of China.

Reuters quoted a Pentagon official, Dan Devlin, as saying, “What we have seen is that any video game that comes out… (al Qaeda will) modify it and change the game for their needs.”

The influential committee, chaired by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), watched footage of animated combat in which characters depicted as Islamic insurgents killed U.S. troops in battle. The video began with the voice of a male narrator saying, “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters…”

Several GP readers immediately noticed that the voice-over was actually lifted from Team America: World Police, an outrageous 2004 satirical film produced by the creators of the popular South Park comedy series.

In the rush to prove their worth it is entirely conceivable that a contractor ran off without double checking details - the video’s creator does after all go by the nickname “Sonic Jihad” is Moroccan-Dutch and loves the genteel sounds of NWA and Public Enemy - though one has to wonder where the COTR and government project manager were on the days preceding their appearance on the Hill . . .

Regardless, while this particular video may not have been created by Jihadists, its value as a recruiting tool is undiminished. Let us also not forget the broader theme here of terrorists adopting the computer-based training approach, which has been going on for some time.

Preparing to Fail

A long post derived from Inside the Pentagon (subscription):

Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who led a “red team” of notional enemy forces at the outset of JFCOM’s Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, is calling on the command to spell out publicly how the experiment has influenced the Defense Department view of “effects-based operations.” Van Riper — who retired in 1997 as head of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, which oversees service training, warfighting doctrine and education — cites Millennium Challenge ‘02 as a prime example of what can go wrong for those focused on creating effects. […]

Early in the game, Van Riper — playing the role of adversary commander — decided to pre-emptively strike a fleet of 16 U.S. Navy warships and Marine amphibious vessels notionally steaming into the Persian Gulf. Using fast patrol boats and converted civilian craft as strike platforms to bombard the U.S. warships with cruise missiles, Van Riper’s red team overwhelmed the Navy’s Aegis radar and sank an entire simulated blue armada in one day. […]

Once the blue ships were sunk, Van Riper says his red team prepared for another iteration in the game. Having previously participated in numerous joint war games, he knew the stage would be “reset” for a fresh confrontation of blue and red forces.

Nothing like winning and then having the losers hit the re-set button.

But this time, he says, JFCOM officials instructed his staff that “no V-22s [would] get shot down” — referring to the Marines’ new troop transport rotorcraft — and the entire blue air force must be allowed to fly unabated.

Parallels to Gunny Highway in Heartbreak Ridge notwithstanding, this is a great illustration of why it doesn’t pay to put all your eggs in one strategy basket, grand or petite. They are not without value, but there are too many monkeys armed with wrenches out there. When you have to cheat to win in a simulation (an all too often occurrence) then you are setting your forces up to fail.

Nicely Done Mr. Barone

Acting on Assumptions with Iran & Iraq:

To learn lessons from history, including recent history, it’s essential to get the history right. That’s why, in order to understand what to do about the mullahs’ regime in Iran, it’s worth revisiting the debate over the intelligence in Iraq.

. . . and that’s just the first paragraph.

A nice summary of the key issues to date and a little reminiscent of Mr. Wehner’s article of a few weeks ago. Both however neglect to point out that one straight-forward way to learn our Iraqi history lesson sooner rather than later is to work our way through the writings and ruminations of the Iraqi government. Those who posses the records are looking forward, not back, so they’re putting some of what they have online for others to deal with. The whole situation is strange to me on many levels. Intel professionals love to talk about the importance of history, but apparently the preference is to let recent history become ancient history before giving it serious consideration.

Iraq is not a mirror of Iran, but having a more thorough understanding of what was going on there back when there was no threat of invasion provides us with a large set of data points that can help prevent similar mistakes from happening again. From an intelligence perspective, there is nothing like reading first-hand confirmation – or refutation – of your pre-war assessments. As someone once said:

The results of any … analysis of captured Iraqi documents may not provide proof positive of any particular pre-war assumption, but the knowledge gained in the trying could help ensure that future intelligence efforts against high value and hard targets are not post mortem affairs.

De Oppresso Liber

Work (I won’t call it duty) calls and finds me at the keyboard when I should be doing something that a lot of brothers are unable to do today: enjoying their families.

In between flashes of corporate panic I find myself visiting the ‘sphere and taking note of those who are intentionally still blogging today, especially the vets who should bloody well know better. I give exceptions to those who post something maudlin and rambling after the grill has been extinguished, the relatives have left and Mr. Daniels has unlocked the emotional vault (if you are in that state and the post time is before 22:00, dude, you have a problem).

One of my favorite haunts recently mentioned the business development efforts of Blackwater. Some color their lobbying as crass capitalism but the firm isn’t asking to solve a border dispute, they’re thinking of liberating the oppressed. While the “international community” argues over propriety, the rapes, dismemberments, and bodies pile up. One wonders if the standard UN course of action for dealing with Nth-world garden spots is: wait long enough and maybe they’ll all be dead by the time we show up.

Even if they did show up what would be the end result? The blue helmets that don’t abuse the few remaining unarmed children will stand aside and watch while the atrocities continue. Don’t do them any favors, Kofi.

It is true that PMC troopers get compensated handsomely for their time and expertise, but then so do the governments that send “peacekeepers.” If it were it not for these assignments certain national coffers would be significantly lighter indeed, so spare me talk of “mercenaries.”

Two things to reminisce on this Memorial Day: Those who died trying to help those who could not help themselves and those who died because others could not be bothered.

Update: Max Boot joins the chorus.

Get Ready for the RIF

A very interesting entry at Strategy Page, with the most significant points brought out in the second paragraph:

DoD is overhauling its entire intelligence apparatus …The plans are pretty ambitious, and are partially implemented. The basic idea is to take advantage of abundant computer power, and affordable networking, to tie together as many troops, vehicles and warships as possible into one giant information gathering system.  . . . DoD has, for years, been aghast at the huge amounts of data that NRO, CIA and NSA collected, but never had the analyst resources to do anything with. The new DoD system is much more oriented towards solving immediate intel problems with all possible dispatch. No more waiting days for satellite photos, when the information was needed in hours, or minutes, to be useful. […]

For all of my former colleagues who didn’t pay attention in I&W training: this is a critical indicator.

Remember how we kept hoping beyond hope that the day would come when they would give us the time to really research problems and think up some original and perhaps even ingenious recommendations for action? As long as we are on this path that is never going to happen. More precisely, the number of people who might get a shot at such gigs is getting smaller by the day. Start sending out feelers to that other place, start making contacts at a think tank, or start thinking about being a professor . . . that or get used to the idea of pulling a couple months of mid-shifts in the J2 every other year or two.

When you’re not pulling nights you might want to think about night school, because some day this war will be over. With the IT investment and changes in tactics, they won’t need a lot of bodies (CSRS-exodus notwithstanding). Be special, or be prepared for the RIF.

Piling on Wehner

Not that he needs it but . . .

Misleading Intel: Everyone (not just some US political cabal) thought Iraq had WMD. We’ve found arty shells with nerve-agent (sarin) in them; documents placing orders for precursor chemicals used to make this thing called Zyklon-B (famously used by another tyrant decades ago); and shady-looking mobile labs that may or may not have been suitable for bio-weapons development (or militarized gelato production). You don’t have any of this stuff on hand if you were actually disarmed and serious about staying that way.

Political Pressure on Intel: Anonymous sources tell journalists who win prizes for compromising classified programs that they were pressured to diddle their analysis, but when given a chance to state the same thing to two bi-partisan commissions, no one says anything. Curious.

Saddam as Threat: He’s a kook not a dummy. He had his shot at the mother of all battles and he had his ass handed to him. The US was only going to get stronger while he fell farther behind. How to project power worldwide when you are at best a regional despot . . . hmmm. Keep thinking Saddam doesn’t know about the writings of Boyd, Lind, et al. If you’re anti-US and you need to go asymmetric, who are you going to turn to? Once again the discounted documents show that not only were terrorists in Iraq pre-war, they were on the payroll. Not a threat? Only if you think in one dimension.

Democracy as Rationalization: Democracy was always going to be the default offering, so to pretend it was a post-war rationale is at the very least disingenuous. We were not going to offer to set up a Principality; then again we are fairly friendly to Liechtenstein so it isn’t like we’re closed minded.

Nice Try (NSA critique) (Update)

One of the better attempts to critique the NSA’s efforts today in the NY Times:

If the program is along the lines described by USA Today — with the security agency receiving complete lists of who called whom from each of the phone companies — the object is probably to collect data and draw a chart, with dots or “nodes” representing individuals and lines between nodes if one person has called another. […]

But without additional data, its reach is limited: as any mathematician will admit, even when you know everyone in the graph is a terrorist, it doesn’t directly portray information about the order or hierarchy of the cell. Social network researchers look instead for graph features like “centrality”: they try to identify nodes that are connected to a lot of other nodes, like spokes around the hub of a bicycle wheel.

An admirable effort, but like all critiques of the program(s) it falls apart because of a lack of information (thank goodness). The key assumption here is that SNA is all that is being done. That would be a reasonable assumption if there weren’t enough mathematicians and computer scientists and social scientists and all sorts of other scientists on hand at NSA to staff a couple dozen universities. The government – especially the intelligence community – is slow, but it isn’t stupid. NSA may be a one-trick pony when it comes to collection, but they’re not strangers to the concept of intelligence fusion.

One story, one mention of a particular technique, and suddenly the program is a failure because there are flaws in the use of merely one technique . . . and people criticize IC analysis.

Guys like me have an unfair advantage in situations like this, but even if you are a complete outsider, sticking to the basics and not giving in to excessive speculation helps produce much better results.

OTB takes a similar tack.

Update:Neighbor and crypto guru Bruce Schneier weighs in on the Farley article in the NY Times. He is naturally skeptical, which is what you’d expect from a guy who writes encryption algorithms. I also heard the NRP version of this article yesterday afternoon, which reiterated the same points and despite deducing the answer, suggested there was an unanswered question: What should we do if the mentioned techniques alone are unlikely to work?

Now there is no way my math skills stack up against the likes of Schneier and Farley but the answer here is so obvious I’m wondering if I’m not merely mentally inadequate but outright stupid. The answer of course is that there is more than one technique being applied to the data in these programs (which I mentioned previously). A sole source of data is inadequate? The techniques are inadequate? How about maybe the reporting is inadequate?

It is all well and good to get hyped up over a startling revelation associated with the intelligence business, but to suggest that everything in these leaked reports is the whole story is a mistake. Reporters might get some of the story, the might even get some of the documents, but they’re not read into all of the program(s). I direct you to what my pal Tom has said on this topic and leave it at that.

I will reiterate, and all politics aside: let’s give our intelligence officers a little credit.

Now THIS Creeps Me Out

So the other day I tried to use my credit card to buy something, and it was denied even though I knew perfectly well my credit card was just fine.

So I called my credit-card company to find out what was up with all this, and it turned out I had made the unpardonable mistake of making two payments on my card in the same billing period. So they froze my card, according to the person I spoke to, because Homeland Security rules say if you pay twice in one period they will lock up your account for 10 days. Apparently paying twice in the same period is the sort of thing terrorists do in some effort to undermine our American way of life.

I’m fairly sure they meant “anti-terrorism financing rules” not “homeland security rules” but why quibble? I’m also fairly sure paying down debt is not high on the list of jihadi priorities. Some CT analyst correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think that keeping up the ol’ credit score isn’t a high priority if one is getting ready to go to their just reward. When everyone and his brother is trying to track you down why bother with the ancient, trusted, and untraceable Hawala system when you can use Visa?

Spies in the Shower

From InfoWorld:

I don’t want to alarm you, but a reader just sent me evidence showing that a large and secretive organization is tracking some surprising information about us. No, not the National Security Agency. We’re talking about a really secretive organization: Proctor & Gamble.

The sender hits the nail on the head:

“My privacy is worth more than a $3 discount on hair color, but most people wouldn’t even know they were selling themselves out if they just clipped the coupon with an uncritical eye,”

The government knows you called your mother last week; P&G knows your curtains don’t match your carpet . What creeps you out more?

BOHICA

Personal data, including Social Security numbers of 26.5 million U.S. veterans, was stolen from a Veterans Affairs employee this month after he took the information home without authorization, the department said Monday.

The INFOSEC practitioner in me wants to beat some GS-half-wit @$$ . . . the ex-GI in me lowering my trousers and spreading ‘em . . .

Captain Ed makes a good point at Captain’s Quarters: by design big programs are unlikely to betray us, but careless/clueless individuals may very well. Unlike say, a computerized program that looks at numbers, a human with someone else’s name, SSN, and other data can actually do damage and really violate your privacy (not to mention your bank account and credit rating). The jury is still out whether this was part of some cunning plan or just someone after someone else’s hardware (most likely). Either way I find it hard to believe taking this data home for some O/T work was authorized by superior or statute.

All related discussions are satellites around a core question: is our data our own or not? Pick on nanny-state Europeans all you like; they’d sooner give up a limb than personal data. Trading in personal data w/o authorization might cost you a (figurative) limb. Barring the creation of a similar situation here in the US, what constitutes misuse and abuse of personal data will remain very much a point of view.

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