Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

NSA: The Global Warcraft on Terror

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The latest absurdity of national security theatrics has been revealed by the Snowden leaks:

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

I think someone at the NSA conned their bosses into letting them play World of Warcraft at work…

But for all their enthusiasm — so many C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.

It’s just one more example of how the U.S. government has ramped up an expensive and invasive façade of protection that provides no real safety. It’s pure theater, much like most of the arcane airport security rules and carry-on restrictions.

Former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

How to Talk to Voters (Badly)

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TPM Livewire today:

Iowa Republican Senate candidate Mark Jacobs said the best way to connect with women is on an “emotional level.”

Jacobs made the comments during an interview with Iowa’s WHO-TV in Des Moines on Sunday.

“I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level,” Jacobs said. “And with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that.”

Because if we know anything at all about American politics, it’s that our male voters are uniformly stone-cold machines of hyper-rational logic who totally don’t freak out over any perceived threat to their status in the social, economic, and gender hierarchies, resulting in their surrender to factually incorrect emotional appeals and poorly conceived policy ideas.

In contrast, who can understand the mystery of women voting exactly in line with their financial, health, safety, and bodily autonomy interests time and again? Must be an emotional decision.

*eyeroll*

UN backs French peacekeepers into Central African Republic

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After sectarian killings in the Central African Republic accelerated this week, leaving over a hundred dead on Thursday morning alone, the United Nations Security Council finally acted to authorize France to begin an active peacekeeping role, with its troops who were already on their way. Air and street patrols began today in the capital. The French troops join a small African Union force also on the ground already.

Background discussion: Episode 65.

Mali coup grave may have been found

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Mali investigators searching for 23 missing elite presidential guard troops who vanished a month after the March 2012 military coup have found 21 bodies outside the base of the coup leader. The transitional government, which succeeded him after regional pressure forced him from power, recently arrested him for complicity in kidnapping.

This terrible find was probably only uncovered because of all the international and regional attention on Mali after the coup government lost control of the north to Islamist rebels and had to be bailed out by France. Meanwhile, next door, the President of Burkina Faso has been in office since the 1987 coup — and as I understand it, according to the one surviving eyewitness account of the coup d’état, pretty much everyone in the presidential mansion was gunned down during that coup. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anyone calling for a new government and investigations there.

Securing loose arms

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Besides regular domestic gun control and gun safety, there’s also been a growing concern since the fallout from arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s as to what happens to those weapons (and bigger, military-grade hardware) once they go overseas into war zones. So how to solve that? Lots of solutions are being floated, and The Economist has an extended rundown on them:

Technological tweaks may be able to make possible weapons that stop working after a certain period of time, or can only be used by specific people or in particular places. Proponents of such technologies believe they have the potential to succeed where political and legislative attempts at arms control have failed…

I suspect — and this is sort of alluded to in the article linked above — that the major flaw in these concepts is that the secondary market, particularly in developing nations, doesn’t acquire the weapons until maybe 15 years after they were sold to the primary buyers.

I’m not an expert by any means, but just from reading news descriptions of the equipment seen in various ongoing conflicts, I think they end up having a use lifespan of 20-30 years (depending on the type of weapons). So most of the technologies being developed now could probably be hacked or eliminated in refurbishment by the time the secondary market was using them.

It would be like selling safes with fifteen-years-behind-state-of-the-art security to third world banks and then being surprised that ten years after they were first cracked in the first world, people were able to crack them all over the third world and make off with lots of money.

I guess then the question becomes whether this high-tech approach is better than doing nothing. Letting top of the line U.S. weapons systems and light arms fall into the wrong hands is something to be avoided, but this may not actually be solvable. And other, older weapons that can’t be traced (or even new issues of old models by less scrupulous manufacturers in some countries) are likely to be fueling wars for many years still to come. The people selling the tech are pitching this as a panacea that will succeed where legal measures have failed. I don’t buy that.

Syria, Lebanon: Small reform, big potential impact

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kurdistan-map-ciaSometimes the role of government isn’t about the really big things. Sometimes, it’s just about the little things that affect everything else.

Lebanon and Kurdish Syria (a semi-autonomous region) have been making a key reform in one such area: the establishment of civil, non-religious marriage and relationships. The idea, previously banned, finally allows people from two different religious sects to be legally married without one of them having to convert.

In both Lebanon and Syria, religious affiliation is not a personal choice but rather a legal fact included on documents from birth onward. This has contributed to the perpetuation of intense sectarian conflict and tensions for the past century.

Al Jazeera America:

Syrian Kurds Hmaren Sharif and her groom, Rashou Suleiman, signed the country’s first civil marriage contract over the weekend, under new laws administered by the ruling Kurdish Democratic Union Party.
[…]
In multi-confessional Syria, where about two-thirds of people are Sunni Muslim and the rest mainly Shia, Christian and Druze, civil marriages between members of different faiths have long been forbidden.

It is unclear if Sharif and Suleiman are themselves from different sects, as the new law does not require participants to disclose that information.

The introduction of civil marriage in Qamishli is seen as a measure to uproot rising sectarianism and undercut the authority of religious leaders over social institutions like marriage, 3arabi Online said.
[…]
Saturday’s ceremony, meanwhile, was lauded by civil marriage activists, who have been bolstered by a year of unprecedented progress in a region of the world where sectarian leaders wield much power over personal matters like marriage.

Kholoud Sukkarieh, one half of the first couple to obtain a civil marriage license in neighboring Lebanon, told Al Jazeera she was alerted to news of Syria’s first civil wedding when activist group Civil Marriage in Syria tagged her in posts about it on Facebook. She called the new marriage law “a great step forward.”

“It is so courageous and brave to do such a thing during this sectarian war in Syria,” said Sukkarieh, who had her Sunni sect designation struck from her official identification so that she could marry a Shia in April. She and husband Nidal have since welcomed Lebanon’s first sect-less baby into the world.

Obamacarthyism

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Even people at AEI (a prominent conservative think tank) think the total rage is a bit out of control:

“I’ve not seen anything like this before,” said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is just such an interesting phenomenon — call it anthropological or sociological or pathological. An obsessive hatred with all things Obamacare that has infected everybody on the Republican side. They can’t say anything positive about any element of a law that is based on their own fundamental ideas. It means that when anybody says something that could in any way be construed as positive regarding Obamacare it becomes fodder for attacks. … Conservatives are eating their own.”

In a way, the phenomenon is reminiscent of McCarthyism, named after Sen. Joe McCarthy, who in the 1950s accused U.S. government officials and others of secretly sympathizing with communism. But Obamacare McCarthyism takes that to a new level, Ornstein argued.

“Even then it was pretty clear that you had a lot of Republicans — it was very clear that President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower viewed what McCarthy was doing as appalling,” he said. “We call it McCarthyism when you’re basically slimed for something you said or did. But even that was different because you had a party that was divided — not on the issue of communism, but on whether it was fair to [attack people as communist sympathizers].”

Ornstein summed it up this way: “These are the talking points and if you don’t apply them, then you’re a traitor.” He confessed that he’s “never seen anything like that before. I mean, you can certainly find party litmus tests,” he said, mentioning support for abortion rights and opposition to the Vietnam war for Democrats in the 1970s. “But this has been taken to a level that I think is almost bizarre.”

 
You can hear my own — fairly extensive — thoughts on this topic in Episode 62 – Role of Government.