Monthly Archives: September 2001

Weird Religious Intolerance

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Today I spent most of the day with my wife’s family celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday. Returning home tonight, I checked my e-mail which contained a one-liner from someone I don’t know. The entire e-mail message was,

Shove your Bible up your ass…I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Which is a bit odd considering I’m an atheist. I actually sent a brief retort to this, only to receive another e-mail asserting that because my correspondent was working on his second MBA, that he knew what he was talking about. Which was very odd, since he was angered by my animal rights site. I’m still trying to grok the connection between an MBA and animal rights.

Anyway, apparently in all those years of education, he never learned basic manners.

Pacifism is (Usually) Stupid

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MSNBC has an article by National Journal writer Michael Kelly ripping on pacifism. Kelly essentially recycles George Orwell’s excellent debunking of the British pacifist movement during World War II. As Kelly notes, since Nazi Germany wanted to conquer Great Britain, pacifists were helping that effort even if it was not their intent.

Doc Searls seems to think he can refute this with the line, “Hey, it failed for Christ, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, right?” Unfortunately, his examples only illustrate why pacifism only works under a set of very circumscribed conditions.

The inclusion of Jesus Christ is a bit odd, since I believe Christ was eventually crucified. I think that’s a fate most of us would prefer to avoid.

But Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the obvious exceptions to the rule. Why did their nonviolent policies actually succeed? The answer is that both were opposing liberal democracies who claimed to uphold certain values in theory, but, in fact, did not uphold those values in practice.

Ghandi and King put British and American hypocrisy on full display for the world to see. Ultimately each leader succeeded because their respective societies found the reflection in the mirror to be revolting.

Nonviolent movements, however, have a very poor track record in societies that are not liberal democracies. A group of brave students in Nazi Germany, calling themselves the White Rose, secretly distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in 1942 and 1943.

When they were finally caught, the Nazis didn’t let them sit in jail to write inspiring letters as King was allowed to do. Only four days after their arrest, the three students at the core of the White Rose movement were put on trial. After a trial that lasted only four hours, they were convicted and sentenced to death. All three were beheaded later that afternoon.

Another student, who evaded arrest for a short time, was also tried, convicted, and executed just as swiftly, while others who played less important roles in the organization were sent off to forced labor camps.

I am not arguing that the White Rose was a failure because they stuck to leafletting rather than taking up arms against the German state. What I am arguing is that it is sheer delusion to think that nonviolence and pacifism will bring down states like Nazi Germany.

Is Jorn Barger a Racist?

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Dave Winer wrote something on his web log yesterday which I had been thinking, but hadn’t gotten around to reading — in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom web log has really descended into a rather bizarre mix of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories involving Israel.

Last December I mentioned that I was a fan of Robot Wisdom and visited it regularly, but Barger’s posts have become so bizarre that I rarely visit the site anymore.

The Israeli embassy made a minor error in releasing estimates of how many of its citizens were missing or dead in the attack, for example, and Barger has spun that into a huge conspiracy theory in which Israel allegedly knew about or even planned the attack and evacuated its citizens from the building beforehand. The average “X Files” episode had more credibility than that.

Barger had always flirted with the line between anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, and in my opinion completely crossed over that line a few days ago with his, “Leading White-House hawk Wolfowitz is also highest-placed Jew” link.

It’s bizarre to see someone who is otherwise so intelligent go off into this sort of nonsense.

Support for “All-Out War” Drops 9 Points In Zogby Poll

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On September 17, Zogby International polled 1,018 people and asked them, among other things, “Would you support or oppose an all-out war against countries which harbor or aid terrorists?” An enormous 75% of respondents said that they would. But just 10 days later, on September 27, that number fell 9 points to only 66%.

I assume part of that is the very welcome restrained reaction of the George W. Bush administration. Like a lot of people apparently, I expected that cruise missiles and long range bombers would have been used very quickly to strike at Afghanistan. But Bush has been extremely restrained — far more restrained, in fact, than I think either Al Gore or Bill Clinton would have been (both of whom seemed to value symbols over substance in these sort of crises).

I almost couldn’t believe it when I read an interview with some official (I think it was Donald Rumsfeld) saying that whatever the ultimate military response would be, it was not the intent of the United States to overthrow the Taliban regime. Clearly the United States is doing everything it can to undermine the Taliban short of actual hostilities, but I was surprised they were ruling out military action specificlaly targeting Afghanistan’s government.

Would Encryption Controls Have Prevented the 9/11 Attack?

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After the terrorist attack on the United States, politicians and security experts are emerging from the woodwork to essentially revive the Clipper chip initiative. All cryptographic systems, these folks claim, should have built-in backdoors which government authorities could use to decrypt messages if need be. Aside from the civil liberties issues, the main problem is that this seems to be based on a false premise — that the terrorists were able to pull of their brazen attack because, at least in part, they encrypted their communications.

Piecing together what little has been publicly revealed, it seems that rather than rely on PGP or other encryption schemes, the terrorists used plain old unencrypted web mail, public access terminals, and the ages old practice of code words to talk about their plans. According to a story in The Guardian,

FBI investigators had been able to locate hundreds of email communications, sent 30 to 45 days before the attack. Records had been obtained from internet service providers and from public libraries. The messages, in both English and Arabic, were sent within the US and internationally. They had been sent from personal computers or from public sites such as libraries. They used a variety of ISPs, including accounts on Hotmail.

According to the FBI, the conspirators had not used encryption or concealment methods. Once found, the emails could be openly read.

In fact, as a security expert told The Guardian, if the terrorists had used PGP their plot would have had a higher chance of being uncovered since the steady stream of encrypted messages would have stood out.

Terrorists and criminals who are not already known to authorities can hide in this way because of the sheer volume of communication over the Internet. The NSA, for example, is reportedly building one of the largest electronic archival systems in the world, capable of holding up to 20 million gigabytes of information … an amazing amount of information, but according to The Guardian, only enough space to archive intercepted Internet communications for 90 days.

And just think how much larger that traffic is going to be 5 or 10 years from now, as the rest of the world starts to become as wired as the United States and Europe already are, and new applications and uses for the Internet take off within the already Internet-saturated countries.

Did CNN Use 10-Year Old Footage of Palestinians Celebrating? No

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Among other rumors that spread like wildfire on the Internet after the 9/11 attacks was that CNN’s footage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the attacks was actually 10-year old footage of an unrelated event.

The footage actually came from Reuters, and CNN has a brief statement debunking the claim that the footage was not genuine which tracks the origins of the rumor to an e-mail post made by a student in Brazil.

Meanwhile, there’s been only limited coverage of the fact that after the initial broadcast of Reuters’ footage of the Palestinian celebration was aired, that other camera crews received thinly veiled threats that the Palestinian Authority would not be able to guarantee their safety if the footage ever made it onto American telvision news stations, which is why CNN kept showing the same footage over and over again, though there were in fact a number of similar celebrations in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

America Cannot Be Protected Against Terrorism

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Okay, that might be a bit of an overstatement, but there is no way to turn the United States into a terrorist proof zone.

Don Larson linked to a Reuters story about proposals to protect nuclear power plants from possible aerial assaults.

The problem is that the number of ways to inflict mass murder is so large that you can never plug all the holes in the dike.

Here’s a little recipe to kill a few thousand people. Find a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility nearby. Figure out where they store their chemicals and find a way to blow up that plant. Results — probably tens of thousands of deaths (think Bhopal, India).

For example, Pharmacia has a couple of plants here in Kalamazoo. One of the important chemicals used in pharmaceutical production are cyanide and related compounds. If a terrorist could successfully blow up the storage facility where those compounds are kept, they would probably kill tens of thousands of people in just the first couple hours.

(The amusingly macabre thing about this particular area is that we might not need terrorists to cause this disaster. In the sort of decision that only Americans would make, the city decided to place its airport right next to the pharmaceutical plant, meaning several dozen planes fly over the plant either taking off or coming in for a landing. There have been a handful of crashes near the facility, and it’s only a matter of time until a commuter plane accident wipes out everybody in lower Michigan and upper Indiana).

And if we sat down and thought about it, I’m sure we could think of dozens of ways to kill thousands of people. There’s just no way to childproof the world.

Salon’s Cutting Edge 9/11 Reporting

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Friday’s Salon.Com had an excellent example of its own irrelevance. While web logs, e-zines, and other web sites were producing a lot of often compelling material on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Salon.Com went with what it knows best — sex.

That’s right, Sex in a time of terror is actually a serious attempt to look at how the 9/11 attack affected people’s sex lives. I.e. — just another stupid excuse for Salon.Com to provide more annoying pseudo-titillating material.

Broadband Providers Need to Educate, Allow Subscribers to Better Protect Their Systems

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Wired has a story about broadband providers simply cutting off access to users whose systems become infected with Code Red or Nmida. Wired mentions that Speakeasy and DSL Inc. simply yank access to users whose systems are infected with such viruses/worms.

This is a big problem, but an even bigger problem is that most broadband providers a) do almost nothing to educate their users about the security problems associated with broadband service, and b) actually forbid users from using the best security methods to ward off infestations and attacks.

I’ve been through the process both with DSL and cable and neither provider even so much as hinted that I might want to think about any sort of software or hardware solution to prevent attacks on the computer(s) hooked up to my broadband connection. Both providers had information on firewall software buried deep in their web sites, but I assume they were afraid providing any security information might turn off potential customers.

Since I am very concerned about security, I run a small NAT router. The problem is that this is in direct violation of my agreement with the cable company which strictly forbids using any sort of router.

That restriction is added because they don’t want people using the cable access to run web, ftp, and game servers. The problem with servers is a legitimate concern — the first week the students cam back to the university here, my cable connection was almost nonexistent because the bandwidth was being used by students setting up bandwidth-munching servers.

But it’s stupid to simply ban routers because of this. Routers, after all, don’t make it difficult to find the people abusing the system. Talking with a tech support guy about the problem, he said they could identify neighborhood-sized areas where the traffic was thought he roof and then run port scans to determine who was violating the terms of service.

The ban on routers, then, simply makes the average home users system less secure, while really doing very little to fight the bandwidth hogs. Rather than fighting routers, broadband providers should be encouraging people to buy them as an important part of general network security.

Know Who Your Friends Are

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After the 9/11 attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. Accordingto an MSNBC report,

AfghanistanÂ’s neighbor, Pakistan, also has incentives to cooperate. For siding with the U.S. against the Taliban and bin Laden, Islamabad stands to get as much as $3 billion in debt relief, emergency aid for refugees and the removal of sanctions that were imposed when they tested nuclear weapons and staged a military coup. That would enable Pakistan to also get military aid, including spare parts for its F-16Â’s, Tow missiles and armed personnel carriers.

NBCÂ’s Mitchell reports that Saudi Arabia has also offered Pakistan free oil.

Before we climb into bed with Pakistan, however, lets remember that Pakistan shares many of the features that President George W. Bush so eloquently noted plague Afghanistan.

For example, a little over a month ago a Pakastani court sentenced Dr. Younis Shaikh to death for blasphemy. What did Shaikh say that was so horrific?

Shaik allegedly said that since the Prophet Mohammed didn’t receive his first spiritual revelation until he was 40, Shaikh argued that Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim during his younger years, and that moreover Mohammed’s parents weren’t Muslim since they died before he revealed his spiritual revelations.

As Human Rights Watch notes, a Pakistani Chrisitian, Ayub Masih, was sentenced to death for blasphemy as well. His crime? He spoke favorably of Salman Rushdie.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Two years after General Zia-ul-Haq took power in Pakistan in 1977, Pakistan’s criminal code was modified with what are called the Hudood Ordinances. These encapsulate some of the anti-female attitudes that are so derided in Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, extra-marital sex is illegal and the age of majority for women is 16 or the onset of puberty, whichever comes first. In practice what this means is that if a 30-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl, rather than prosecute that as statutory rape, Pakistani authorities will in fact go after the 12-year-old girl as well.

And unbelievably the girl cannot even testify in her own defense at such a trial. As a 1999 State Department report on Pakistan noted,

Likewise, the testimony of women, Muslim or non-Muslim, is not admissible in cases involving Hadd punishments. Thus, if a Muslim man rapes a Muslim woman in the presence of several women, he cannot be convicted under the Hudood ordinances because women cannot testify. Similarly, if a Muslim man rapes a woman in the presence of non-Muslim men and women, he cannot be convicted because women and non-Muslim men cannot testify.

And these folks are going to be our new allies?