Global Guerrillas

Trump's Insurgency creates our Tahrir Square Moment

This year, an open source insurgency formed in the US and it took control of the White House.  I didn't write much about it this fall because it hit too close to home.  I knew what would happen.  

What is an open source insurgency?  An open source insurgency is how a very large and very diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent.

I first started writing about open source insurgencies during the war in Iraq over a decade ago.  During that war, over 100 insurgent groups with different motivations for fighting (tribal interests, pro-Baathist, pro-nationalist, pro-Saddam, and lots of jihadi flavors) used the dynamics of open source warfare to fight a global superpower to a standstill.  We saw it again a few years later in the political world, when during the Arab Spring an open source fueled protest toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.  

Open source insurgencies and protests can arise spontaneously and they are very hard to stop once they get going since they are impervious to most forms of repressive counter-attack and political subversion.  For example, the open source movement propelling Trump forward made him impervious to attacks on his character.  It also eliminated any need for "ground game" or standard political organization and obviated any need for information disclosure and detailed policy papers.  

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't defeat an open source insurgency.  You can, but it requires a different approach.  For example, here's a simple idea for how to defeat Trump's insurgency back in July:

IF Trump is running an open source insurgency, you don't go after the man to defeat him. Attacking him directly won't work. He's impervious to attack. One reason is that a good 60% of America has been lied to so much by the establishment, they don't believe anything they say anymore.  The way you beat him is to cleave off part of his movement. In this case, given the dynamics of the movement and this election, the best group to bring back are working class families in the midwest swing states.  To bring them back you need to do something real. Not promises (seen as lies). You need to actually do it. In this case, the best approach is to put the President, the Congress, and most big US companies together in a room and over the course of two weeks and nail down a deal to bring back 1 million real jobs to MI, OH, and PA. -- with real timelines for implementation, good incomes and real benefits. If they do that, this election is over.

If you have been reading me for a decade (or more), you might notice that this thinking is similar to what I wrote as an op-ed in the New York Times in 2005, as a way to win the war in Iraq.  

Two years later, this approach became the strategy that let the US extricate itself from Iraq.  Regardless, Trump is in the White House and the success of open source insurgency guarantees we will see more of them in the future...  

Perhaps sooner rather than later.  

My worry is that the next one we see won't operate within the confines of a political campaign.  This uptick in insults directed at minorities blamed on Trump, may be the tinder for setting off this next insurgency.  Social media amplifies every incident, spreading the anger it evokes like contagion across the country.  Just watch.  This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election -- a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US.  A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office.  

Unfortunately, an open source insurgency that forces a sitting President from office without the benefit of an election could result in the same outcome as Egypt (or worse Syria).  

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS:  For more: here's some more thinking on how to start one.  The IEEE Spectrum has a primer on open source warfare.  My book is probably the definitive source for it.

The Terrorism Tax hits Europe

This is big news.  This is the first large scale demonstration that the "Terrorism Tax" I speculated about back in 2004, actually works.    

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Liz Alderman at the NYTimes reported that terrorism is squashing Europe's first glimmer of recovery since the financial crash.  EU economic growth has been halved since spring, with France now at zero.  Here are some details:

• Tourism is sinking.  For example:  "In France, growth in nightly hotel room bookings after the Paris attacks fell to single digits from 20 percent. After the Brussels bombings, bookings went negative, and after Nice, bookings fell by double digits."
• Daily security costs are spiking.  Here's an example from a single venue, "the Paris Plage, a makeshift beach erected along the Seine, a dozen armed police officers guarded an entry checkpoint on a recent day. Army troops marched past families playing in the sand and half-empty activity points along the river. The patrols, cost taxpayers about 1 million euros, or $1.1 million, a day."
• Broad spectrum economic damage.  For example:  retail sales are slumping due to low traffic in stores and large numbers of entertainment events are being cancelled.  

The Terrorism Tax

Although Europe has suffered terrorism before, this time it's different.  Instead of big and relatively infrequent terrorist attacks, these new attacks are small, numerous and geographically dispersed.  This change is a big deal, because it makes it possible for terrorists to turn attacks into "a tax" that depresses economic activity by imposing new costs and changing economic behavior.  Here's some of the theory from my 2004 article on it:  

A terrorism tax is an accumulation of excess costs inflicted on a city's stakeholders by acts of terrorism.  These include direct costs inflicted on the city by terrorists (systems sabotage) and indirect costs due to the security/insurance/policy/etc. changes needed to protect against attacks.  A terrorism tax above a certain level will force the city to transition to a lower market equilibrium (aka shrink).  So, what is that level?  Here's what they concluded:

• Singular terrorist events (black swans), like 9/11, do not impact city viability.  The costs of a singular event dissipate quickly.  In contrast, frequent attacks (even small ones) on a specific city can create a terrorism tax of a level necessary to shift equilibriums.
• In the labor pooling model of city formation, a terrorism tax of 7% will cause a city to collapse to a lower equilibrium.  Labor pooling equilibrium reflects the benefits of aggregating workers in a single location.  Workers get higher wages and more choices.  Firms get stable wages (no one firm can deplete the market) and more candidates.
• In the core-periphery model of city formation, a terrorism tax of 6.3% will push a city to a lower equilibrium.  The core-periphery model is based on transportation costs.  Firms generate transportation savings by concentrating in a single location next to suppliers and customers.  Customers and workers glean the benefit of lower transportation costs by locating near jobs and goods.

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The terrorism tax is even more effective when it is combined with systems disruption (the intentional disruption of infrastructure).  That combo puts in play hidden dynamics - both economic and societal - that can turn a functional society into a violent insurgency within months.  

The FAA vs. the Future

The new FAA rules (part 107) for the commercial use of drones are now in force..   Let me summarize them for you in a single picture:

The FAA rules (needed) are not only years late, they contain a major flaw.

It's a flaw so large, it's similar to regulating cars with the rules used for horse drawn carriages.   You can see this flaw in the rules they are proposing: 

• Visual line-of-sight (VLOS) only; the unmanned aircraft must remain within VLOS of the remote pilot in command and the person manipulating the flight controls of the small UAS.
• A person operating a small UAS must either hold a remote pilot airman certificate with a small UAS rating or be under the direct supervision of a person who does hold a remote pilot certificate (remote pilot in command).
• No person may act as a remote pilot in command or VO for more than one unmanned aircraft operation at one time.

See the flaw yet?

The flaw is that the FAA's commercial drones require a pilot at the controls.  A pilot!   

Really?  

The fact is, as a professional pilot, I can tell you categorically that drones don't need a pilot.  Not inside the aircraft or on the ground with a controller.  They can fly on their own.  

You can see this in how they developed.  Drones only became a disruptive technology the moment that low cost computer chips exceeded the intellectual capacity of insects in 2011.  They didn't become disruptive due improvements in the batteries, motors, and materials used to build them.  These new chips make drones smart enough to do everything insects (flies, bees, etc.) do.  That means they don't need pilots to:

• Stabilize themselves.
• Take-off, land, and navigate.
• Accomplish complex mission tasks.

As you can see, drones only become truly disruptive when they don't have pilots at all.  Yet, the FAA is regulating them in a way that forces drones to have pilots. 

Let me put this in terms of work.  Drones without pilots make the following things possible (none of which are possible with pilots at the controls):

• Tireless.  Accomplish tasks 24x7x365.  
• Scalable.  Billions of drones can be used at the same time.
• Costless.  The cost per minute for drone services would drop to almost nothing.  

If these capabilities are unleashed, it's possible to do for drones what the Web/Internet did for networking.  

What is needed is a ruleset that makes Dronenet possible, not a system designed for commercial dilettantes.  

Hacking the US with only a Sound

What happens when a terrorist network (ISIS) finds a way to activate terrorists using social media (neatly piercing the security defenses that we pay hundreds of billions of $$ for every year) to randomly attack civilians (like the  knife attack in Roanoke VA last week)?  

You get a society at a tipping point.  A society at this tipping point is reactive and labile. It is EASILY sent into a frenzied retreat.  

How is this different? 

Unlike the classic example of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater, this panic can be induced by anything that sounds/looks/feels like a threat rather than the claim of a specific threat (like "fire").  Nearly anything can set them off.

Here's three examples of that over the last two weeks (there have been many more):

• JFK Airport.  Unfounded reports of gunfire led to an evacuation of terminals.  Police march passengers out of the terminal with their hands up.  Police speculate that it was started by load fans of the Rio Olympics.
• CrabTree Valley Mall (NC):  Unfounded reports of an active shooter leads to a panicked evacuation of the mall.
• LAX Airport.  Unfounded reports of a shooter led to people storming the jetway doors and spilling out onto the tarmac, people barricading themselves into bathrooms in multiple terminals, and more.

This public reactiveness may become the new normal both here and in Europe.  If so, we can expect people take advantage of it.  

Here's how.  

All it takes is a single audio clip.  Like this or this either near a public space or done remotely on a timed playback device is all it would take to ignite the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that leads to a large scale evacuation.  In fact, people are so reactive now, I suspect it wouldn't even take a sound that is explicit, only something that sounds similar.

Think about this for a moment.  The ability to shut down a public space for hours:

• anytime (just walk in and play the sounds),
• remotely (low cost playback device on timer/remote activation), or
• on a large scale (thousands of people playing the sounds on their smart phones in public spaces simultaneously)

is a substantial capability.  

How so? Take this fall's election for example.   

It is a far easier to close a voting location with a sound than hack a voting machine.

 

 

Cognitive Dominance

I'll get some down and dirty insurgent thinking up tomorrow.  

In the meantime, here's some of my thinking on a strategic concept that could direct the development of autonomous robotics.  It's called cognitive dominance.  

Cognitive dominance is the ability to make more and better decisions than the competition through the use of autonomous robotics.  This scenario, written in pentagon speak, applies some of the ideas I outlined earlier.   

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The war started when a peer competitor’s African client state invaded a weaker neighbor.  The peer competitor had been investing heavily in this client state over the last decade in order to gain exclusive access to a massive tract of increasingly rare, arable land.  To expand this precious resource, the client state (with the peer competitor’s backing) invaded a neighboring country to seize its arable acreage.  This aggression created a massive humanitarian crisis, sending tens of millions of refugees north towards the safety of the European Union.  The global response to this aggression was immediate and clear, but the demands to withdraw went unheeded.  

To overcome this impasse, the US issued a stern call to the client state to withdraw and to back it up, US military forces were sent to to the region.  This move prompted the peer competitor to decry US intervention in the “internal affairs” of Africa and that US forces would not be permitted within 1,000 nautical miles of the affected region.  To back this declaration up, the peer activated a massive A2/AD defense system it had been building in the client state over the last decade.   With this move, the situation became a direct threat to US and global security.  Simply, if this provocation was allowed to stand, Africa and much of the rest of the world would be quickly divided into areas of control, defined by the effective range of A2/AD systems.  To prevent this outcome, a combined US led Joint Task Force was assembled to remove the peer competitor’s A2/AD system from the region and force the client state to return to it’s pre-war borders.  

This was the first major war since rapid advances in RAS inspired a revolution in military affairs transformed the US military.  The fruits of this transformation were seen in the first days of the war when the Joint Force opened up its first front in the war with RAS platforms and weapons systems already inside inside the opponent’s territory and formations.  In fact, much of this mix of cyber and robotic weapon systems had already penetrated the opponent years ago.  These cyber side weapons had been built to slowly traverse the Internet on their own looking for target systems to disable when hostilities began.  On the robotic side, there were long term underwater vehicles screwed in the sandy muck of the client state’s harbor, a critical pathway for the peer competitors long supply chain.  Other robotic weapons systems were entrenched in the landscape in and around the peer’s installations.

These prepositioned systems had been gathering detailed information on the peer country’s order of battle in the client state for many years.  In fact, some of these prepositioned systems were cognitively adept enough to actively retrieve [and analyze on the spot] the detailed information most needed by the Joint Force Commander.  This information provided a critical part of the “big data” in the Joint Cloud that Joint Force autonomous systems used to construct detailed physical, organizational, and systemic models of the opponent.  These models made it possible for the Joint Task Force commander to run the millions of simulated engagements needed to develop successful methods of attack and uncover the nasty surprises that could put the mission in jeopardy.  

Based on this earlier work, the first major assault of the war was designed to stress the peer’s A2/AD system in order to gather intelligence on its operation, deplete its resources, and [if possible] reinforce the Joint Force’s prepositioned forces with new capabilities.  The assault was composed of RAS swarms of smart air, land and sea platforms set to a high degree of variable autonomy.  Given the risk of the mission, the human teams teamed with the swarms were stationed beyond the edge of the battle area.  The RAS swarms were trained to deceive, jam, and confuse the active sensor network, on land and in space, the opposition’s defense systems relied upon for strike guidance.  This worked.  The defense system was lit up like a Christmas tree and fired multiple salvos of hypersonic missiles at the Joint Force assault.  However, when these missiles reentered, they were unable to find the ships and aircraft they were expected to destroy.  The second wave sent by the defense system was composed of thousands of low cost RAS platforms packed to the brim with lightning fast PGMs.  The RAS platforms, manufactured in large volume over the last two decades, were expected to close on targets and overwhelm them with superior mass.

As these forces closed, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a fair fight.  The Joint Force personnel at the edge of the effective battlespace were not surprised to see that the cloud-based training system they used to train their RAS swarms up until the last few days had successfully exploited the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the peer’s A2/AD system.  These swarms were able to systematically confuse, jam, outmaneuver, evade, and destroy the much more numerous RAS platforms of the opponent due to the far superior situational awareness, adaptability, and training of the traditionally developed systems deployed against them.  The swarms that did make it through did run into a surprise when the anti-air mobile laser used RAS based cognitive capabilities to knock out a dozen Joint Force drones before it was taken out of action.  Fortunately, the peer’s employment of RAS platforms that were cognitively dangerous, was limited to this this mobile laser.  This allowed the surviving drones to successfully reinforce the prepositioned assets before departing for recovery.

One the second day, the Joint Force Commander decided, based on the high degree of success so far, to accelerate the battle plan and takedown the entire A2/AD system without delay. The takedown assault began with an attack by hypersonic MIRVed missiles launched by F-35s in the north and converted Aegis cruisers at the edge of the peer’s defensive envelope.  These missiles released mesh networked MIRVs with the cognitive capability to rapidly evaluate their local situation and adopt the appropriate tactics during the handful of seconds available in the reentry phase.  To their credit, the MIRVs worked as expected, and they were able to take out the mobile RAS lasers that had been so problematic the day before.   Simultaneous with this, the forward deployed RAS forces sprang into action.  Cyber weapons forced the systems they had penetrated into critical collapse and the RAS UUVs in client state’s harbor blew up two peer munitions transports, crippling resupply efforts.  In few short hours, the entire defense grid, with tens of thousands of PGMs still unused, was down and Air Force and Navy continuous monitoring by flights of man/machine teams went into action to ensure it stayed dark.

The moment the grid went down, the third and final phase of the operation was launched.  This phase leveraged the automation of the US military’s logistics system to rapidly stage a ground assault force to secure the area.  Largely automated, this system was able to move men and material at and construct forward bases at an unprecedented pace.  It was so fast, in fact, the Army and the Marines were ready to stage their assaults within a few weeks of the success over the defense grid.  The men on the assault teams were armed with RAS weapons and able to find, identify, track, and engage multiple threats simultaneously.  They were teamed with RAS attack dogs and RAS mules serving as the support base for the swarm of RAS drones constantly gathering information for the team.  

The Army teams moving overland and Marine teams arriving by amphibious assault [in and around the harbor] traveled rapidly within self-driving RAS vehicles.  Since these vehicles, and the drones above them, were all using decentralized movement protocols, thousands of robotics vehicles were able to maintain high speed forward advance without congestion.   Mesh networks connected these ground assault teams with the reinforced prepositioned forces, the combat overwatch above, and each other.  The ground assault’s RAS driven vehicles rapidly converged on the defended points identified by the prepositioned forces.  Despite some hard fought engagement and a few attempted ambushes, the ground assault was over quickly.  It was later determined that that due to the rapidity of the assaults, the peer competitor was completely unprepared for a ground assault.  

Cognitive dominance achieved, the Joint Force Commander accepted the surrender of the enemy commander.

All Hail The Meme, The New King of Political Communications

During this year's US election, what is the most common form of political communication?

Is TV, print, or online advertisements?  No.  

Is TV, print, or online journalism?  No.

The most common form of political messaging is found on social networking.  It's called a meme.  

A meme is an image and with a bit of text that conveys a very precise emotion or idea.  Up until this election, they were usually packaged like this:

Since then, memes have become aggressive products of political communication like this (notice the use of visual language and text to produce a precise emotion):

Millions of memes have been made.  Thousands more are being made every day.  

Once made, they undergo a brutal process of natural selection with the best ending up on sites like Reddit (like the subreddit, The_Donald), where subreddit members critique and vote up the best of them.

Successful memes abound on every social network, often going viral to reach tens of millions of viewers in days as they are rapidly shared with an ever expanding network of friends.

Collectively, memes generate tens of millions of impressions an hour.  Several orders of magnitude (100x) more than any other form of political communication.

Unlike TV, Print, and most forms of online communication, memes are built for consumption on smartphones and visual modes of social networking.  They are also built for speedy consumption, providing a quick emotional hit in comparison to a long winded article with an uncertain payoff.  

Nothing other form of political communications compare.  

Memes are one of ways online conflict, in this case political conflict, is being fought.   These online wars are occurring everywhere, all the time, at every level.   They are deciding the future.

That's why I'm writing a new book called as a natural follow on to my previous book: Brave New War.  

The War Online

How Conflicts are Fought and Won on Social Networks

I haven't decided on a publisher or an agent for it yet.  So, if you are interested in publishing it, ping me at john@johnrobb.org.  Needless to say, I have so many amazingly cool ideas to share and it is becoming so central to our future, I have little doubt it's going to be a hit.

More soon.

John Robb

PS:  This is an example of what Neal Stephenson called a mediaglyph - an icon used for communicating complex ideas with people who never learned how to read.  A future filled with people who can't read, didn't happen.  Reading is common, but having time or the means to read isn't. 

I'm doing Reddit AMA on open source insurgency

I've been asked to do an AMA (ask me anything) with Reddit's largest group (200k members).  

___________

Please join me in welcoming John Robb for an AMA this Friday, August 12th, at 7PM EST!

John is an entrepreneur, defense and political expert who pioneered the theory of open source warfare. You can read much more on his blog, Global Guerrillas.

And you can read John's bio here.

Open source insurgencies are informal associations of many independent groups. Members work towards a “plausible promise” – a shared goal that is broad enough to interpret according to one's own needs.

Global elites are hollowing out the nation-state, creating the vacuum in which open source insurgencies thrive.

Why is this interesting for the election? Because Trump’s campaign is also an open source insurgency. This is the science behind meme magic, and it’s why the establishment is doing everything they can to stop it. But while these types of movements win, something more is needed to build - John is also an expert in decentralized, resilient economies. The type that can bring security and stability in an era of automation and institutional collapse.

If you want to learn more about how Trump's campaign works and what it might mean for the future, you don't want to miss this AMA!

Again, please join me - this Friday, August 12th, at 7PM EST!

A few articles of interest - very much worth the read!

Open Source Insurgency (the basics)

Hollow State Politics

Trump's Insurgency

The American Autumn

The Orlando Transcript and a Renewed Terrorist Threat

Let's Make a Political Party out of Software

Our political system is broken.

How do we fix it? We don't.

We hack it.

We build a political party that works like a network.

How? We turn the party into an app.  Into software.

My collaborator, the successful tech entrepreneur Jordan Greenhall, has a proposal for this.

His proposal? Build an app that allows members of the party to directly control the actions of the representatives they send to Washington. In his proposal, everything that the representative does in Washington, from votes to vetoes should be debated and voted on by the party members within the party app.

However, instead of directly voting on every issue, party members can choose to give their votes to proxies who have the time, the character, and the expertise to make informed decisions on the issue. Once the vote is decided, the elected representative of the party in Washington would then cast that vote.

Would it work? It might.  

It turns political decisions from something done by remote representatives over dinner with lobbyists into a highly participatory activity.  However, due to use of proxies, it can be done without much of the cacophony seen in direct democracy efforts (or the collaborative sausage making we get with apps like piratepad).    

Contrast what would happen with a party like this in this year's election.  

Instead of relentless name calling by a petty press and even pettier candidates, people inside the party network would be engaged in party debates over the issues to be decided before they vote for their candidates in the usual way (in the voting booth).  

As bad as it could be, the party network app would be better than it is today.  From the process of sending people to Washington to what they do after they get there.  

Further, a software based system would undergo an iterative process of improvement, getting better with each failure, rather than the endless groundhog day of failure we currently see. 

I say, let's try it.  What do we have to lose that we aren't losing already?

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: If built correctly, this party as app could run circles around traditional parties. It could even field candidates inside their primaries like the Tea Party and Sanders did, hacking them from inside.

PPS: Summer is coming to a close and I'm looking for something interesting to work on over the next year.  Specifically, I'm looking for a project management or strategy gig in a tech company in either Boston, NYC, or Washington.   If there is a nat defense gig available, I'm up for that too.  Let me know if you have something where I can help you succeed > john@johnrobb.org

The American Autumn

Some thinking you might find useful.  It might sound wild and remote, but we are in a wild and out of control year.  ANYTHING can happen.

A treasure trove of e-mail and voicemail messages from the Democratic National Committee has been leaked.  Here's what happened.

• The first installment of the leaked e-mails was released by Wikileaks at the start of the DNC convention.  More leaks have and will follow.
  
  
• The contents of the leak show a brazen attempt by the DNC to help Hillary win the primary.  It also shows Dem campaign staffers to have acted inappropriately and in a prejudiced manner.
  
  
• Based on forensic analysis of the leak, it appears that the Russian government is involved

The effects of the leak have been immediate and intense.

• The leak provided the confirmation to Sanders supporters that the primary was rigged against them.  This has led to intense protests both within and outside the convention.  This suggests that the Clinton campaign lost a large number of Bernie supporters forever.
  
  
• The media and the US government reaction to the leak has been aggressive.  They claim that the release is a brazen attempt by Putin to influence the US election by helping Trump win. There have been attempts by the media to tie Trump to Putin but those lack evidence of any connection.
  
  
• Further, now that the Russian have interfered in our election, it's possible that they will do again.  This could be done through more leaks or as Bruce Schneier has pointed out: a hack of poorly secured voting machines on election day.  

Where could this end up?  This is the interesting part.  This election isn't a normal election.  It is also a good demonstration of something the great scholar of warfare, Martin van Creveld said ~ if you fight barbarians long enough, you become a barbarian too.

• The Trumpification of the Establishment >>  Trump isn't running a campaign, he's running an open source insurgency (see my earlier article on this) that makes him nearly immune to personal attack, and it is working.  He has secured a whopping 7 points (47 to 40) lead over Clinton in a recent national poll by the LA Times/USC -- despite the fact that nearly EVERYONE in the media, academic, government, and political establishment is working against him.  This loss of control has infuriated the establishment, leading to increasing levels of paranoia, hyperbole, and anger (particularly in the media).  In short, the establishment is starting to act increasingly like Trump does -- exaggerating and amplifying everything.
  
  
• Intentional Electoral Disruption.   The potential threat of Russian hacking (voting machines, etc.) fits the scenario I outlined in my freakishly popular US Civil War article from earlier this year.  With the tension between the divisions in the country increasing rapidly as both sides amplify and exaggerate every event, any overt attempt to rig (through disruption or hacking) the outcome of the election could result in widespread violence and/or a national fracture.

• The Administrative 'Coup'.  Here's something that I didn't think possible until this week.  The Trumpified establishment might have found an avenue for disqualifying Trump as President:  Trump's rhetorical suggestion that Russian hackers should find Hillary's deleted e-mails.  This has led many people in the establishment to contend that Trump committed 'treason and is now a clear and present danger to the security of the US.'  This national security angle -- the overt interference by Russia in US governance -- could make it possible to block Trump as a candidate on national security grounds. 

Social Violence Networking

It's amazing how quickly social media broadcasting has become central to social violence. It is being used by all of the participants:

Attackers (video was removed):  Larossi Abballa Facebook livestreamed his terrorist attack on the home of a police chief in France.  

Victims:  Diamond Reynolds Facebook livestreamed a policeman shooting her boyfriend while he was reaching for his wallet.

Bystanders. Michael Bautista livestreamed the Dallas police shooting.

 

 

Social Violence Networking 

 

This use of social media has led to a new dynamic that bypasses the "redirecting - calming - slowing" influence of traditional media and the government.  This new dynamic is raw, unfiltered, and fast.  It also radically increases both the likelihood and the intensity of social violence.  

 

Let's dive into some of the details:

• Violence as performance art.  Selfies.  Instagram videos.  Twitter.  We've been conditioned to record our experiences using social media.   Naturally, we're are seeing the same thing with violence. Recording violence and showing it to the world, raw and unedited, can be used to "elevate the act" and memorialize it.    NOTE:   ISIS recently stumbled onto this as a way to motivate people to engage in terrorism.  In these cases, the attackers used social media to turn their bloody attacks into both performance art and solemn ceremony.  It gave it meaning. We'll see more of that in the future.
  
  
• We are bombarded with Instant outrage.  We are more vulnerable to emotional manipulation than ever before.  Our use of social media has changed us.  We are constantly on the hunt for pics, news, stories, and videos that grab our attention and titillate us.  Once we find them, we are then quick to share them with others.  Few things provoke outrage faster than violence and injustice.   It is proving particularly effective when the videos arrive raw and unedited from an individual rather than from the media.  These personal broadcasts have an authenticity, a vulnerability, and an immediacy to them that greatly amplifies their emotional impact.  This makes them more effective at triggering violence than any sterile broadcast from a traditional media outlet. 
  
  
• Echo chambers.  Our virtual networks on Facebook, Twitter, etc. surrounded us with people who think like we do.  These networks can easily become echo chambers.  Echo chambers that radically amplify outrageous social media videos, spreading the outrage like a contagion.  More importantly, it appears that this amplification can trigger individuals on the fence to engage in violence.

Watch out.

This roiling dynamic for amplifying social violence is very, very dangerous.  It has the potential to rip the lid off of this country faster than we can respond.

 

John Robb

Journal 6.26.2016 Brexit to ISIS

Some items to think about:

• Brexit is a true black swan.  Nobody in the mainstream, including the Leave camp, saw it coming.  Even now, based on the analysis being written, few people understand why it won.  Why did it win?  The cosmopolitan, financialized elites saw their incomes grow with globalization, but the deals they struck to "earn" those gains required throwing the bottom 60-70% of the country under the economic bus.  In fact, nearly all of the fast rise out of poverty seen globally was achieved by economically damaging the working populations of the developed world (particularly in the US and the UK).  That lopsided deal is a bomb of anger that has been growing for years.  A bomb that is now going off in the US and the UK.  Strangely, nobody in the establishment is willing to do what is necessary to defuse this bomb.  This means it will get much worse before it gets better.
  
  
• The response to Brexit will damage nation-state legitimacy.  Efforts to ignore the vote, delay the effects of the vote, and water down the effects of the vote will achieve only one thing:  it will show that the remote technocrats have more legitimacy than the vestiges of democracy that are left. 
  
  
• A doctoral student at the Univ of Cincinnati built an auto-fighter-pilot AI that runs on Raspberry Pi (a $35 computer).  It was so good, it beat retired US Air Force fighter pilot, Lt. Col. Gene Lee, in three engagements.  

  Lee:  "I was surprised at how aware and reactive it was. It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking. It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed." He added that with most AIs, “an experienced pilot can beat up on it (the AI) if you know what you’re doing. Sure, you might have gotten shot down once in a while by an AI program when you, as a pilot, were trying something new, but, until now, an AI opponent simply could not keep up with anything like the real pressure and pace of combat-like scenarios.”

• Apparently, the FBI has found that Omar Mateen wasn't gay and that all of the evidence to the contrary was false.  
  
  
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Bot Platforms and the race for Nation-State Advantage

Bots will transform warfare, from guerrilla warfare to conventional state conflict.  

Before I get to how bots will enable the automation of terrorism (a truly transformational development), let me spend a bit of time on how it will transform nation-state militaries.  

The most important thing for nation-state militaries (US, China, Russia, EU, and India) to understand about bots (both hardware and software) is that it's imperative to get the underlying platforms and standards correct first, before we waste billions on standalone systems.

These platforms include:

• Cloud based learning/sharing for bots.  When any bot learns something, it can then share that "understanding" with every other bot connected to the cloud.
• Decentralized standards for physical and logical interconnections between bots (NASA is working on this right now for drones, but the FAA and state DMVs are doing their best to hold the US back).
• Big Sim and Real World Sandboxes for training and teaching autonomous bots for use in the field.  From crowd training/turking to mission certification.

PS:  Incidentally, the nation-state that is able to set these platforms into motion first, is likely to get the same five year economic, security & technological headstart the US enjoyed with the emergence of the Internet.  

 

The Orlando Transcript and a Renewed Terrorist Threat

Enemies innovate, particularly open source networks like ISIS.  

That's a given.  It's what you do in response to that innovation that matters.

That's where we are at right now.  As I've been writing (1, 2, and 3), it appears that ISIS has found a way to solve the biggest problem with networked terrorism.  A reliable way to span the gap between online support and physical action that isn't easy to detect.  A online zero to terrorist "hero" ritual.

They accomplished this by building a formalized ritual that combines initiation (a self-planned attack) and a public pledge (a formal lifelong, irrevocable pledge of fealty to the Caliph), and acknowledgement (redemption, acceptance, and honor).  It appears to work.  For example, here's what Omar Mateen said on one of his telephone conversations.  Note how important the pledge is to Omar in this public record of the call.

Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD): Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
Shooter (OM): In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I'm in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What's your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.
OD: Ok, What's your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him [Arabic], on behalf of the Islamic State.
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call]

The same process was seen a day later outside Paris by an attacker who killed two senior members of the police.  

A New Wave of Terrorism?

With this methodology in place, ISIS has the ability to bypass the security procedures that were effective against attacks from the remnants al Qaeda, and strike US and EU targets.  Let's dive into the numbers.  According to a George Washington Univ study from December 2015 on ISIS:

• 300 active "recruiters" online in the US.
• 250 have been stopped, attempting to leave the US to join ISIS in Syria.
• 900 active investigations into ISIS supporters in the US.
• 71 have been charged, 56 in 2015.  Of these 86% were male with an average age of 26.

If ISIS has developed an online ritual that can turn supporters into active attackers without exposing itself to security services (travel, planning, chatter, etc.), how many new attacks might occur?

How bad could this get?  

If only 20% of the people who were stopped travelling to join ISIS in Syria to risk their lives as fighters conducted this ritual, we could expect 50 new attacks.   A mere fifty percent of people who have already chosen active participation and were willing to put their lives at risk, that would mean 125 new attacks.  I suspect we could see many more than that if this takes hold.

Posterior Armor

Unfortunately, the US government (with the media's support) has been defensive.  It is claiming that ISIS was not involved -- mentions of ISIS, Islam and al Baghdadi were redacted from the Orlando transcript   It is even making the case that this is merely a run of the mill "postal" (insanity + easy access to guns) attack.  The reason for this?  The US government doesn't want to admit that the US counterterrorism strategy has been on autopilot for a decade and that it has now failed.

This isn't the answer.  There is only one response to an enemy's innovation.

Adapt.

Have fun,

John Robb 

Disruptive Robocalling

Three months ago, I wrote up a worst case scenario for how the US could end up in a civil war this fall.  Unfortunately, nothing has changed.  The conditions that make the scenario possible are still valid.  

In fact, in one way it has gotten worse:  one of the theoretical methods of disruption that I featured in the scenario was recently used in the real world.  In my scenario, robocalling was used to shut down polling places to skew election results and plunge the US into chaos:

Robocalls pour in to police departments and polling places in heavily (Rep or Dem) polling locations with bomb/terrorist threats. Widespread poll closures occur. Calls continue until late.

This speculation became reality last month when threatening robocalls were used to shut down dozens of schools in at least 21 U.S. states: Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. As many as 10 schools received the threats in some states.  Further, in the UK, several schools received a 90-second recorded call from a voice with an American accent promising that "shrapnel" would "take children's the heads off," according to multiple news reports.

This was the first time we've ever seen a nation-wide/international use of this technique.  It's also likely we'll see it again since:

• it works,
• there isn't a clearing house for threats of this type,
• responders/bureaucrats are extremely risk averse (even more so since Orlando and San Bernardino), and (most importantly)
• the US phone system is easy to hack.  

Let's expand on that last point.  The reason the US phone system is easy to hack is due to the pervasive influence of the US direct marketing and collections (bad debt) industry.  These industries lobby hard at the state level to ensure full hackable access to the system.  However, this means it's easy for attackers to exploit the system to do real harm.  

Here's an example:  It's possible to dynamically change the caller ID used on every call you make.  This means an attacker can insert fake caller IDs such as "FBI" , "Atlanta Police" etc. to make their calls seem more credible and increase the disruptive impact.

Sincerely,

John Robb 

PS:  bots will make it possible to automate terrorism....

ISIS has found a way to pierce US counter-terrorism defenses

The lone wolf terrorist does not exist.

The lone wolf terrorist is a fiction. He doesn't exist.

The reason is simple.

People don't engage in terrorism as individuals.  They do it as part of a social group.  They need the social meaning a group provides to justify the personal risk and the act of violence.

This need for meaning may be even more true for blood and guts terrorism, given the high mortality rates and public disapproval involved. This creates achasm between cheerleading a violent cause and an actual act of terrorism. Crossing this chasm requires an extensive social investment.

This chasm makes it extremely hard to activate terrorists remotely. The online and offline grooming required to activate any single individual can be easily detected by security forces.  We've been lucky this is true. Groups like ISIS have tens of thousands of active online supporters in the developed world and if they could self-activate even a small percentage of these supporters, we'd be in deep trouble.

Unfortunately, it appears our luck has run out.  The attacks in Orlando and outside Paris have demonstrated that ISIS has found an innovative way to cross the chasm between online cheerleader and active terrorist.  A method made possible by instant and global access to social media and a method that can easily pierce US counter-terrorism defenses.

These attacks show it's now possible to turn online supporters into a self-activating terrorist without heavy investments in individualized social grooming.  This is accomplished by:

• turning the effort required plan, prepare, and execute a terrorist act into a ritual of initiation.  Initiates are expected to undertake this effort on their own, without support.
  
  
• turning the act itself into a forum for a public, online declaration of fealty -- an extremely potent medieval loyalty pledge made by knights to their lords -- to the Caliph of ISIS.  This pledge is made public (both attackers used Facebook to publicly pledge fealty to al Baghdadi) at the moment of the attack to maximize the meaning to the attacker and the audience.  Think of it as social media performance art.
  
  
• immediate acceptance into the ranks of ISIS.  Inclusion in the group and acceptance as a vassal by the Caliph.  In other words: ISIS has found a way to provide social belonging and meaning through an online activation process.

This method is nearly opaque to US counter-terrorism efforts:

• the marketing funnel for this process of activation can be done in the open, in vanilla forums.  Everything required is within the realm of free speech protections. 
  
  
• all of the detectable preparation for warfare is done by the initiate by himself, which makes it very hard to detect.
  
  
• it has zero barriers to participation. Anybody can undertake the initiation and pledge loyalty, from the criminal to the self-hating homosexual, and they will be accepted (their past will be washed away) upon pledging during the act.  

Even in its raw form, this method of activation has yielded two successful attacks (Orlando and Paris) over a couple of days.  

Now that this form of attack has been demonstrated we are likely to see many more.   

Have fun,

John Robb

PS: The primary national security challenge for the US following the collapse of al Qaeda in 2008, was to prevent the establishment of another global terror network that could find new ways to attack the US. We failed at that. Not only have a new, bigger, badder terror network (ISIS), it has now found a way to attack us again, again, and again.

PPS: The media and the government will spend the next couple of months finding "motives" for Orlando in order to avoid connecting this to ISIS. That's a waste of time. This process of activation, is open to all other motivations for an attack.  All that matters is that initiation and the ritual occur according to script.

 

Online Fealty

The ISIS Caliphate is using online fealty as a way to recruit jihadis around the world.   It's a powerful recasting of an ancient concept that goes well beyond modern expressions of loyalty.  

The way ISIS has constructed its brand of online fealty makes it globally scalable.  The  only barriers to entry are:  conduct an attack and publicly pledge fealty.  The most common platforms for a public pledge?  Social media, 911, etc.

For example, when Omar Mateen pledged fealty to ISIS during his deadly attack, it provided him with the following:

• It instantly gave him permission to conduct an attack in the name of ISIS.
• It instantly accepted him into the ranks of ISIS as a proven holy warrior.
• It cleansed his previous sins (particularly his conflict over his sexual orientation).

This recasting of fealty is interesting within the context of open source insurgency because it might provide ISIS with a way to construct a globally scalable, segmented network of terror.  

That's a very new innovation.   

Have fun,

John Robb

 

Fealty and Modern Terrorism

During his deadly attack on a packed Orlando nightclub where he killed 50 people and wounded many more, Omar Mateen called 911.  

On the recorded call, he pledge his loyalty to ISIS.  

A day later, a terrorist outside of Paris, used Facebook livestreaming to pledge his loyalty to ISIS while stabbing a police chief and his wife to death.

What's going on?

The answer is that these pledges aren't simply expressions of loyalty, they are expressions of fealty, a much more powerful means of connection.  

Fealty is something we haven't seen since the middle ages.  ISIS became capable of employing fealty once it rebuilt a barebones Caliphate and it is using it to transform modern terrorism.

To understand this, let's dig into fealty a bit. 

• Fealty is a strict, lifelong pledge of loyalty from a vassal to a lord.  It's public and irreversible.  (If you watch Game of Thrones, it's why everyone hates the Kingslayer, even if he was justified in his actions)
  
  
• Fealty obligates the vassal to act in the service of the lord, without any need for specific direction.  It also gives the protection of the lord to the vassal (in a religious context, salvation and redemption).
  
  
• Fealty made it possible to build large, geographically segmented networks in a world without instant communications and rapid travel.    

Fealty allows ISIS to get around some of problems of modern open source insurgency.   For example:

• A potential terrorist shouldn't express fealty until the attack.  Benefit: This prevents discovery during the grooming process.
  
  
• A public expression of fealty (FB, Twitter..) provides them with instant acceptance by the "lord"  Benefit: this provides them spiritual protection for the attack and maximizes the publicity for ISIS
  
  
• A Jihadi, or their local network, shouldn't ask for permission, planning, or support.  They should act on their own.  The attack itself is a demonstration of loyalty.  Benefit: this reduces chances of discovery and maximizes the innovative potential of the global network.

The more I think about it, fealty is an extremely useful way of harnessing and directing the power of an open source insurgency (aka, herding cats).