Monday, December 22, 2014 

Sony Pictures! Fuck yeah!

There's something for absolutely everyone in the on-going Sony Pictures hacking saga.  Everyone really meaning everyone, as anyone with even the tiniest bit invested in the entire clusterfuck, with the possible exception of President Obama, has ended up looking the worst kind of self-absorbed hypocritical tool.

Congratulations must go first and foremost to Sony Pictures themselves, for oh so many reasons.  We can start with commissioning The Interview to begin with, merely the latest attempt by Seth Rogen to convince the entire world he's even less talented than James Corden.  Many people have pointed out that Kim Jong-un is just about the only real life national leader a Hollywood studio could get away with depicting the assassination of, as they certainly wouldn't dare to do the same to Xi Jingping of China, not least when it's an emerging market and any criticism of the country is most certainly now off limits, and when it comes to say, Iran, they have to be slightly more subtle about it, as we saw with Argo.  Not so subtle that when it came to handing the Oscar over, it was Michelle Obama doing it mind.

Up next has to be Sony's lamentable security in general.  This isn't the first time it's been found wanting: LulzSec first gained access to personal data from Sony Pictures via a SQL injection attack back in 2011, only a couple of months after the Playstation Network had been taken offline for a month following the stealing of data from the near 77 million accounts made on there.  Quite how the "Guardians of Peace" gained access to so much of Sony Pictures' data isn't yet clear, although suspicion is they were given help from within.  Whatever the case, you certainly wouldn't bet against Sony falling victim again.

Then we have the withdrawal of the film itself.  There are some caveats here: despite the chains now claiming they merely wanted the release delayed until it became clear how serious the threat from GoP was, it would only have taken one idiot to do something vaguely menacing at a screening for the lawsuits to start flying.  Delaying the release indefinitely would also have sparked the same hyperbolic reaction as we've seen, as though not immediately releasing a turkey of a comedy is somehow akin to 30s appeasement.  This said, and even bearing in mind how the past year has been one long episode of people saying things and then hastily withdrawing them and/or apologising after others have declared themselves offended, Sony must have known there was no realistic threat.  North Korea being one and the same as the Guardians of Peace or otherwise, neither is about to fly a hijacked airliner into a cinema showing the film.  I'm not one to start crying about censorship or giving in to dictators or "cyberterrorism" over a Seth Rogen vehicle, but plenty will, and indeed have.

Which brings us to the luvvies themselves.  If like me you'd prefer celebrities to be seen and not heard, or for that matter not seen either, nothing is more likely to get them spouting forth than first their extremely private emails to studio executives getting leaked, followed by their unreleased films (for which also see Madonna) and then finally a studio withholding a film mocking the easiest target in the entire world.  Still, if the likes of Rogen, Brad Pitt and Aaron Sorkin hadn't spoken up there wouldn't have been the delightful sight of celebs condemning a free press for reporting on information in the public domain, something that just slightly undermines the whole horrified reaction to Sony then withdrawing the film.  Not that reporting on the information dumped by GoP doesn't raise ethical issues: after all, the very same organisations that professed themselves shocked and outraged anyone would so much as look at the images and video leaked during the "fappening" (while telling everyone precisely where to find them, natch) didn't have the slightest qualms about spreading the news of Angelina Jolie being described as a spoilt brat and Sony executives telling hilarious racially flavoured gags about President Obama's favourite movies.  That North Korea could be ultimately responsible for the leaks seized upon just adds to the amusement.

Finally, there is the "cyberterrorism" aspect.  Cyberwarfare ranks only slightly behind anti-terrorism itself in the bullshit stakes.  Cyberespionage is a problem, yes, as proved by just how many designs the Chinese have ripped off in recent times, yet when it comes to actual direct threat to lives there simply isn't one.  As every single domestic appliance starts connecting to the internet for God knows what reason there might be, but those times aren't here quite yet.  This hasn't though stopped the usual suspects from shrieking about the Sony hack being an act of war, before even the slightest evidence has been produced to prove this really is the work of North Korea rather than just those with a certain amount of sympathy for the hermit kingdom.  Real state sponsored hacks in the past have been to steal things worth having, or to send a message directly to a country, if we take the Estonia attack for example as being the work of the Russian state, or say the Stuxnet worm.  As embarrassing as this whole incident has been for Sony, not to mention costly, no one could have seriously expected them to decide to pull the film entirely.  Credit must go to Obama for describing the attack as cybervandalism rather than jumping on the bandwagon, even if discussions are taking place about putting North Korea back on the state sponsors of terrorism list.

North Korea then.  Villain of choice for Hollywood film-makers who don't want to make their antagonists just generic terrorists, for which see Die Another Day, the remake of Red Dawn (the invaders were meant to be Chinese only for the studio to decide to make them North Korean in post-production) and Olympus Has Fallen.  Strangely, the latter two make the country seem threatening when it most assuredly isn't, at least to the wider world, as both South Korea and Japan have legitimate reasons to worry about the stability and sanity of those in charge.  The reason the country has made such an issue out of The Interview and didn't about say Team America is fairly obvious: Kim Jong-un is still consolidating his power and ranting about this outrageous American insult, or even doing something about it makes clear he is not to be crossed or underestimated.  It certainly isn't, as some have ludicrously suggested, that such a film could through the power of mocking alone help conjure up opposition to his rule.  If that was the concern, Team America would have received more of a response, although frankly Kim Jong-il's being "so ronery" is the best part of the entire, very flawed thing.

Directly responsible or not, Jong-un's point has been made.  As for the rest, they've responded in the only way they know how: by making it about themselves.

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12/22/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, September 04, 2014 

Desperate business.

It's a strange old world.  You might have thought for instance that regardless of how the SITE Intelligence Group, formerly the SITE Institute, is a self-started organisation that presents itself as an adjunct of the security services but in fact operates as the middle man between jihadis and the media and therefore needs to get more exposure, it wouldn't have plastered its logo all over the Islamic State's "Second Message to America" video.  It might not, as was the case in the previous video, actually show the beheading of Stephen Sotloff, but it most certainly does have the terrified, close to tears Sotloff reading out the statement demanded of him, before then cutting to an image of Sotloff's prostrate body, his severed, bloodied head placed on his back.  On the opposite side of the image to SITE's logo is the Islamic State's billowing black flag.  Still, it's good for business, right?

Equally odd is the idea a media blackout helps when it comes to those abducted in Syria or elsewhere.  Until Tuesday night when our new friend Jihadi John, as we apparently have to refer to him, was seen holding the scruff of David Haines's neck, we didn't have any idea there were Brits held by IS or any of the other groups.  The government and media did; they just felt it was better for all concerned if we were left in the dark.  Even yesterday, despite the rest of the world's media being understandably exercised by another westerner threatened with an especially grisly, brutal end, our own finest were pussyfooting around naming him.

As unlike our European counterparts we refuse to pay ransoms, failing a successful rescue operation David Haines faces the same fate as both James Foley and Sotloff.  It's true this might not have been the case until recently, as we don't know whether Foley, Sotloff or Haines were abducted by groups or rebel battalions other than IS and then sold onto them, and there might have been negotiations going on with them about possible deals not involving money, but if not IS has likely held these men with the intention of using them as pawns in a potential battle of wills with the west.  Media publicity before now might have made some sort of a difference, as it clearly did when Alan Johnston was abducted in Gaza, for instance.  It's certainly difficult to think of further harm it could have caused, unless the coalition is haunted by the memory of Ken Bigley and the pressure put on Tony Blair at the time over it.

Ah.

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9/04/2014 10:31:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 02, 2014 

A greater and deeper threat. Just not to us.

In a world so overflowing with bullshit, one where it's difficult to keep your head above the surface in the septic tank of life, it takes a statement the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of cow dung to give anyone the strength to make the effort to say simply, and boldly, you're talking crap.  According to our prime minister last Friday, the threat from the Islamic State, or ISIL, as he insisted on referring to the group for some bizarre reason, despite how we haven't described the greater area of Syria as "the Levant" for a very long time (those in the region refer to IS as Daash, the acronym for Dulat al-Islam fi al-Iraq wal-Sham, i.e. ISIS) is "greater and deeper than ... we have known before."

 It's never been clear when politicians talk about threats and security just how far is it we're meant to go back in looking for a comparable situation to the one we're facing now.  Are we talking black death style threat, Spanish Armada type threat, the civil war, Waterloo, Crimea, the Boers, the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Soviet Union, the IRA, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida?  Obviously enough, the new threat is always greater and deeper than we've known before, and we're all meant to have absolutely no knowledge of history at all, or indeed a memory span beyond that of last month.  Tony Blair claimed on a number of occasions the threat from al-Qaida was beyond comparison, just as every dictator we've faced off against since Hitler is, err, worse than Hitler.  Mao might carry the distinction of (arguably) killing more of his own people than any other 20th century leader, but it's always to good ol' Adolf the glib and shameless turn.

David Cameron's press conference came after JTAC concluded the overall threat is now once again severe, despite the lack of any specific information suggesting an attack is being planned or is any more likely than it was the previous day.  This is especially curious as only a few months back new checks were put in place at airports after specific intelligence suggested bombs could be concealed in iPhones or Samsung Galaxy devices.  That didn't necessitate any wider action, and yet here we are with a hypothetical threat from Islamic State requiring a "rules of the game are changing" style intervention, urgent legislation and the general public told to be more vigilant, reporting any concerns they have to the local cop shop.

Except Cameron's rhetoric hasn't matched the measures announced.  With the removing of citizenship from those born here not possible without breaching international treaties, the government instead proposed temporarily excluding those who've gone to fight in Syria or Iraq from the UK, without explaining where they would be expected to stay or just how long such an order would remain in place.  The police might be given the power to confiscate passports from those looking to travel, while TPIMs, the coalition's replacement for control orders, could be tightened by reintroducing the relocation element.  No one relocated under a control order absconded, so correlation must equal causation, right?  Even during the debate Cameron was emphasising how it "sticks in the craw that someone can go from this country to Syria, declare jihad ... and then contemplate returning to Britain having declared their allegiance to another state".  Apart from buying into Islamic State's own sense of self-importance, he knows full well those who do return can be prosecuted under the alarmingly widely drawn powers in the Terrorism Act, as Mashudur Choudary was, despite not having fought in Syria at all.  It raises the question of why if around half of the 500 estimated to have travelled to Syria to fight have come back more haven't been prosecuted, unless that is the threat posed by these Brit mujahideen has been over-egged.

Why then such a disjunct between the message and the action?  It's not down to the concerns of the Liberal Democrats, as Labour have made it perfectly clear they're prepared to bring control orders back, and so are hardly likely to defeat the coalition, at least on this issue, for the sake of it.  Nor does breaking international treaties bother a party set to propose leaving the European Convention on Human Rights in its election manifesto.  Instead the reasoning behind it seems a strange mix of playing up the threat for all it's worth, just in case the Americans decide they would like our help in Iraq and/or taking the fight against IS into Syria, preventing a repeat of last year's fiasco, while at the same time knowing full well that for the moment at least the threat posed by IS to the country directly is fairly negligible.  Getting further involved would make the threat worse, just as our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq did, but that irony seems lost on most involved.

With IS having followed through on its threat to kill Steven Sotolof, with the promise a hostage described as British, David Cawthorne Haines, will be murdered next, there's little reason to imagine the thinking behind all this to fail in its aim.  Despite there being no indication either ourselves or the Americans have the first idea of what to do about IS in Syria, as any suggestion of temporarily allying with Assad has been rejected, with the idea of training and arming "moderate" rebels to go after IS still being mooted, it looks as though we're heading towards another intervention without having either a plan or an idea of what the end game will be.  Destroying IS in principle is a laudatory aim; when however they have already turned to ethnic cleansing, what's the most likely outcome should they find themselves having to flee their current safe havens?  There is a great, deep threat to those trapped between IS, Assad and the other Islamist rebel forces, and we might just be about to make it even worse.

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9/02/2014 10:11:00 pm | |

Thursday, August 21, 2014 

The security-industrial complex triumphs yet again.

Is there a better job going currently than being an "expert", either in security or radicalisation?  Your words are treated as gospel, regardless for instance of how many times we've been warned the sky is about to fall by these people, whether it be due to the ever more ingenious bombs created by the fanatics or by the sheer number of said fanatics just waiting to get their hands on those ingenious bombs.

Take Shiraz Maher for example, the now go to guy at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, which smartly drops the PV bit on the end and just goes by ICSR for short.  You might remember him (although probably not) for the work he did on Islamic extremism for Policy Exchange, the think-tank behind the report exposed by Newsnight as being based on forged evidence.  Maher's studying and researching pretty much amounts to following those jihadists with either no shame or no brains on Twitter, Skyping with those he's managed to persuade to talk to him about their own personal holy war, and then talking to journalists about the threat posed and horrors committed by these otherwise fine and upstanding gentlemen.  He probably has links to the more discrete jihadis who still use forums too, although the switch to Twitter and Facebook by so many has made the whole monitoring process easier for all concerned.

In short, Maher and his ilk are essentially spooks, only not as useful.  His numerous interviews with those out in Syria and now Iraq don't tell us anything we didn't already know, or rather tell those who have gone through Maher to get their own interviews exactly what they want to hear.  According to Maher the first wave of fighters going to Syria went with the best humanitarian intentions, only becoming further radicalised once they got there.  This ties in precisely with the bogus idea of the armed uprising at the beginning being dominated by moderates pushed by the violence of the Assad regime into embracing jihadism (for an especially putrid example of how this argument is still being made, you can hardly do better than this Left Foot Forward piece, a blog transformed by James Bloodworth into one pretty much advocating war all the time, all of the time).  This isn't to say some British fighters weren't at the start somewhat naive about what they were getting themselves into, considering the reporting which often reflected that narrative, only for it to later flip 180 degrees into the equally absurd, all these people are going to come back and continue the war here territory.

Maher nonetheless pours scorn on the idea any of the British fighters could be compared to those who joined the International Brigades in the 1930s.  The "modern state simply cannot allow itself to become a launch pad for every foreign conflict" he writes, except presumably when those conflicts are ones we approve of, or indeed take part in ourselves.  It's also deeply odd how so many of the 500 or more fighters have managed to leave the country, with only the waifs and strays and clingers-on prosecuted.  What purpose for instance was served by jailing Mashudur Choudary, who came back here precisely because he realised he wasn't cut out for the jihad game?  If letting them go is the plan, and it's not necessarily a bad one, shouldn't that be made clear, or are we playing a game of double bluff?  Maher even repeats the ridiculous claim that the Islamic State is too extreme for al-Qaida, when the split between IS and AQ was about personalities and just which was the "real" al-Qaida affiliate in Syria rather than tactics, despite AQ central's concern in the past over al-Zarqawi's igniting of a sectarian war.  Syria is nothing if not a sectarian war after all.

The belligerence of foreign fighters as described by Maher is predictable.  It also hides a weakness, just as the murder of James Foley was the action of a weak actor against a stronger one.  As yet IS hasn't faced an enemy worthy of the name in Iraq, although it will once the peshmerga proper gets involved.  Its ambition could also be its undoing: fighting on two fronts is liable to spread its best fighters too thinly.  Foreign fighters can threaten attacks against the west, but it doesn't make the prospect any more realistic, although the likes of Maher and the hacks following his every pronouncement will make the most they can out of them. Having successfully got the attention of America and the world, there's only way this is going to end for IS and its pitiful "caliphate".

2 months back the spooks and securocrats were convinced the threat was not from IS but al-Nusra, with all electronic devices in air travellers' baggage needing to be charged to show they weren't the latest AQAP-designed fiendish device.  How quickly things change.  What doesn't is the spiel, the certainty this latest danger is real, will endure, and requires immediate action.  And so the security-industrial complex will continue to triumph.

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8/21/2014 10:44:00 pm | |

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