Public service broadcast: Harman/Kardon spare parts in the UK

If you want spare parts for Harman/Kardon audio equipment in the UK, don’t ring the number on their website unless you speak German. Even if you do speak German, all that will happen is that the nice lady in Austria will eventually give out a phone number for people who might be able to help. Speaking as a Germanist, I believe the UK and indeed the world would be better if more of us spoke German, but I do think this is a lot to ask of their median customer, especially as even those of us who do speak German might struggle to translate whatever recondite subwoofer doodah we’re after.

In order to spare anyone concerned the unscheduled German oral exam, that phone number is +44 1728 746 500, and if you ring it someone in Saxmundham will answer in English.

The Election in Data and Software

Nick Timothy so on Conservative Home:

Ironically, the Prime Minister is the one political leader who understands this division, and who has been working to address it since she became Prime Minister last July. The Conservative election campaign, however, failed to get this and Theresa’s positive plan for the future across. It also failed to notice the surge in Labour support, because modern campaigning techniques require ever-narrower targeting of specific voters, and we were not talking to the people who decided to vote for Labour.

Do modern campaigning techniques require ever-narrower targeting of specific voters? Or is it more that the technology makes it possible, and given the hammer, the world fills up with nails? The advertising trade has a fundamental concept of a trade-off between reach – the number of people you can show a message to – and richness – the quality or elaboration of the message you deliver. Usually, the more elaborate the message, the harder it is to deliver. Imagine a spectrum from cinema advertising on one end to e-mail spam on the other. The era of high TV was also the era of high advertising, if you will, for good reason – TV ads could have both near-cinematic richness and an enormous mass audience, to some extent bucking the trade-off.

Richness is also a form of targeting. The more sophistication you build in, the more people you turn off. This is often deliberate – the iconic Tango Man ads of the 90s, for example, were designed to get much of their effect from baffling your parents and trolling moralising authority figures into getting outraged. Also, richness and targeting both serve the same purpose. It is hoped that a higher degree of engagement and a resulting higher response rate will more than compensate for the reduction in reach. This is crucial, because targeting by definition means sacrificing reach. Delivering ads to targeted individuals means not delivering them to non-targeted individuals.

So how did that work out for you? WhoTargetsMe built a browser extension to instrument what Facebook ads were being served to who.

Geographically, then, Labour’s Facebook campaign was achieving 2.2x the reach of the Tories’. British parliamentary constituencies are designed to be of roughly similar population, so this should be a reasonable proxy for reach.

On Election Day itself, Buzzfeed ran this highly significant story using their own FB instrumentation. They concluded that the most shared stories on Facebook in the immediate run-in were overwhelmingly pro-Labour.

Facebook advertising basically gives you two things – targeted delivery to a big audience, and the potential for viral spread. It’s worth understanding here that the key development in its history as an ads company, which took it from being a loss-maker to being the cash machine it is now, was when it started serving fewer ads. This decision to ration ad space was taken in order to make the app more mobile-friendly and also to rebalance the mixture of content (i.e. what you come for) and ads (i.e. what they come for). Doing so implied an increased emphasis on targeting and richness, because fewer ad slots were now available. It also permitted Facebook to charge more for advertising and to increase its profit margin, because the changes did not increase its costs (if anything, they reduced them).

This creates a complicated relationship between the two poles. Sure, you can drop exquisitely targeted ads and you can load them with HD video or even interactive gaming. But this comes at a price – a price in terms of cash, as you pay through the nose, and a price in terms of opportunity, as there will always be many fewer available ad slots than there are posts that could potentially be filled by shared messages. The optimal solution would be a targeted drop that then goes viral, but this begs the question. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it. Another strategy, as a reader suggested to me, would be to run a lot of different targeted campaigns; but this has the problem that they might compete with each other.

The Tories designed a campaign around “strong and stable” and Brexit, and planned to execute it as a succession of targeted national ad drops and events, managed from the fourth floor of Central Office where a tiny command group consisting of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill plus hired guns Mark Textor, Jim Messina, and Lynton Crosby held sway and controlled the keys to the ad-buying account. This was air-war politics par excellence. The central message would be delivered to people who voted UKIP in 2015 or the EU referendum, preferentially in Labour seats in the North and Midlands.

In the event, though, this didn’t work. For a start, the Tories failed to win the ex-kippers by the margin they hoped for. In many seats they broke 50-50. It was only in seats with very high Leave % where the Tory strategy worked. The problem may have been that ‘kippers in these seats were more likely to be ex-Tories, while elsewhere they were more likely to be generic protest voters. Labour canvassers reported significant numbers of people who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, UKIP in 2015/2016, and Labour in 2017 (“S10, U15, L17“. This may be a case of being fooled by data – the data in question being Chris Hanretty’s celebrated mapping of Leave/Remain votes to parliamentary constituencies, which made the assumption that Leave votes were UKIP votes. The Tories added a corollary to this assumption – UKIP is a right-wing party, so are we, therefore Leave voters are Tories struggling to get out.

Secondly, the Tory strategy created a highly unfavourable electoral map. Much of the Tory effort was targeted on relatively safe Labour seats in the North and had the effect of shaving the big majorities there, while the Labour effort was targeted on marginal Tory seats they could flip. Interestingly, the parties’ strategies remained fixed through the campaign, but Labour’s turned out to be designed for a national swing quite close to the one that actually happened. Jeremy Corbyn campaigned in seats that Labour would flip on a swing of 1 to 5 per cent, and also campaigned in relatively safe Labour seats to work up the turnout and generate buzz in the regional media.#

The BBC’s Chris Cook doesn’t believe this was deliberate, but I wonder. The Tory strategy sounds very much like an effort to replicate Donald Trump’s campaign out of a can – a deployable package of tactics, techniques, and procedures that could be launched from anywhere with a Facebook ad-buyer account and a (platinum) credit card. Yet Trump’s campaign benefited hugely from earned media and virality. Famously, he didn’t even bother buying TV ads until very late in the day. Which brings me to this story.

two pieces of obscure software developed by Labour HQ are widely acknowledged to have played a significant role.

The first helped turn a swollen base of activists into proper campaigners. Called Chatter, it allowed Labour’s growing base of activists to have proper text exchanges with people they canvassed, rather than dispatching them blunt, campaigning messages. “It armed campaigners with the ability to actually make people feel like they were being listened to on a local level,” said a senior Labour figure.

The second was the closest thing Labour had to a secret weapon. Over the last year the party developed a tool called Promote. Its effect was to unleash the power of Facebook advertising to local parties across every constituency. The tool combined Facebook information with Labour’s voter data, but allowed senior activists and candidates to use it to send locally based messages to the right sections of their electorates. Labour is said to have spent heavily through the tool.

“People were seeing stories about their school and hospital, not just national messaging like the Tories were doing”

This might explain why the Facebook strategy worked so well for Labour and so poorly for the Tories. Promote offered decentralised control of the Facebook campaign, letting local candidates release their own messaging. This is also a way of getting the best effect from the rationed pool of ad space – you’re more likely to respond to something that’s actually relevant, so this both makes for virality, and avoids the problem of multiple targeted campaigns cannibalising each other.

Meanwhile, a critically important use of data is to inform your own expectations. Somehow, Labour went into the campaign knowing what kind of swing might be achievable and that it was possible to drive up turnout. This might be the consequence of Chatter, and of the huge activist base.

Nobody Needs Privacy Except Me And My Mistress

Jeremy Paxman spent a whole career interrogating and humiliating politicians over mistakes they made and very definitely over supposed transgressions in their private lives (eh). The BBC – that’s us, in other words – paid him a prince’s ransom for it. The TV programmes he worked on reported in detail on the phone-hacking scandal and, time and again, on incidents where the police or the intelligence services overstepped their authority. There’s a decent chance he was personally targeted by one or other of the tabloids at some point in his career – he was a celebrity in London and therefore by definition a target. He told the Leveson inquiry that Piers Morgan personally told him how to hack voicemail accounts.

Yet, here he is denying that anyone needs privacy.

“Personally I am prejudiced on this question on security and privacy, what is it you are all doing that you are so concerned about? Do you think anyone is really interested in your sex lives? They are not! I can’t understand this.”

This is pukey enough. Morgan wanted to intercept Sven-Goran Eriksson’s phone calls, illegally, precisely in order to spy on his sex life. And it’s not as if he, Paxman, hasn’t had plenty to hide himself (one, two). But it gets worse. Paxman’s talk at InfoSec Europe was titled Governments, Businesses & Other Scoundrels: Why Trust Anyone?, a title that projects the I’m-tough-and-cynical-a-proper-grownup act we paid him so much for. But here’s what he had to say:

“I am prepared to trust the security forces. I think they by and large do a brilliant job. And I think they are kept under reasonable supervision. And I think when people who know about these things tell us, suppliers of communication mechanisms ought to be more responsible, I am rather inclined to take their side.”

Trust no-one, then, except spies. Question the powerful, unless they actually are. That’s some cask-strength establishment cynicism right there. You might consider voting against this today.

The pre-history of the Friedman unit

Those of us who blogged through the Iraq War will of course remember the Friedman unit, a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq, conventionally equal to six months, named for Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman of the New York Times. But I didn’t realise the unit has a prior history. Not until I read Waugh in Abyssinia, that is.

OK so; this is the book Evelyn Waugh wrote about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, that would become the source for his novel Scoop!. It’s a very strange book. Waugh divides it into three parts, and there’s no reason not to tackle it in the same way. The first third is a potted history of imperialism in the Horn of Africa, startlingly radical (he basically adopts a Hobson/Lenin economic-determinist explanation) and very critical of the British (mostly for hypocrisy). His account of the complicated way in which Ethiopia was both a target of imperialism and an expansionist empire itself, and his insistence on the transformative importance of the League of Nations’ international recognition of the country, is great.

The second contains Waugh’s narrative of his travels and the war. This is basically why the book is still read – it’s classic impressionistic travel writing, with good jokes about reporters prefiguring Scoop, fine prose, and a subtle account of a pre-modern society trying to be modern.

What he’s going on about here is one of the key forms of the state in the 20th century – the development dictatorship. Waugh is very good on the conflicts inherent in this, the contract-hunting chancers and weirdos drawn to it, and the ambivalence of the whole project. Ambivalence about modernity is the core theme of his work, and development dictatorship gave him enormous scope to, ah, develop it. One of the key things you have to grasp about him is that although his self-presentation in his old age was as someone who’d been a deep reactionary all along, his books aren’t often like that. He plays up the old git shtick, and then leaps on a train de luxe to the front line. The contradiction is where the art gets in, and why the journey to Ethiopia inspired him.

The third section, though, is completely weird. Waugh went back to Ethiopia after the Italians occupied it, and at this point his scepticism seems to have completely failed him. He kicks off mocking journalists in Djibouti who tell him the war isn’t over and guerrillas are everywhere, warms up by insulting British MPs who make the mistake of caring what happened to the Ethiopians, and travels up the line to Addis Ababa. On the way he observes that every bridge, tunnel, and choke point is heavily guarded by tired, nervous Italian soldiers. No matter.

He goes to see the Italian governor, who has installed himself in the emperor’s palace, surrounded by the few sticks of dictator chic the looters didn’t steal or torch. Six months, they agree. He bashes “liberals” some more. Guerrillas break into the city centre in company size, exactly as the guy he was shitposting says, and he gets shot at. Six months, he says, and everything will be OK. Not just the unit size, or the security situation, but the characteristic architecture and interior design of the Friedman unit has been defined. He has another dig at a British MP for believing that the Ethiopian resistance government still exists. They’ll be put in the bag, in six months. Rather as the Americans never did get Saddam’s appointed deputy, the Italians never did catch it.

He completely falls head over heels in love with the Italian contractors who are building a new road as a counterinsurgency project (it’s going to be done in six months), and announces that the Ethiopians never bothered to build any roads, forgetting that he already praised one of theirs a hundred and fifty pages back. It’s a header right into the deep end of the trahison des clercs.

And we probably better talk about the racism. At this period of his career Waugh has a weird habit where he’s quite capable of being respectful of foreigners’ institutions, character, or appearance…and then he throws in a massive, jarring insult. It’s never integral to his point, but rather chucked in as a style statement, a sort of sprezzatura of turds. This always makes him sound weirdly American, because the style he adopts and the choice of epithets come from there. Rather than the kind of patronising imperial condescension you expect, you get a shot of the Klan, of burning crosses on suburban lawns, corpses towed behind Ford V-8s. Tellingly, he kids himself the Italian conquerors are like…the pioneers of the American West.

The point would be made to him in due course. By the time he came to write the Sword of Honour trilogy, he’s cut it out. It took the second world war to do that. But what interests me is that he didn’t start off writing like that. He got it from somewhere, but where?

Who is the man….SCHACHT!

I’ve just been re-reading the end of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes. Here’s something interesting. Skidelsky frames the debates in Whitehall about British proposals for the post-war economic settlement and about the negotiations with the USA as being between two key groups, whom he defines as the multilateralists and the Schachtians. Schachtian, of course, is a reference to German central banker Hjalmar Schacht.

The element of Schacht’s long and variable career that was meant was his work as Reichsbank director for Hitler, during which he established a network of bilateral trade and payments clearing agreements centred on Germany as a substitute for the collapsed multilateral trading system, that also had the major advantage of conserving Germany’s very limited reserves of foreign exchange and gold. The Schachtian position was that the UK would come out of the war desperately short of reserves – this was common ground – and that given the political constellation there probably wouldn’t be a successful international settlement – this definitely wasn’t – and therefore the UK needed some other solution. They argued that any solution involving capital controls would ruin the City of London, and more tariffs would wreck industry, so the answer was to go bilateral within a sterling clearing network a bit like Hitler’s. An important feature of a clearing agreement is that it tends to force trade into balance, modulo whatever credit the two parties agree to provide each other.

The multilateralists wanted to dilute the conflict between the UK and the US in a wider global solution, and differed on whether it was more important to preserve free trade in the sense of not having tariffs, or whether protectionism was a price worth paying for a workable financial setup. The issue everyone was dancing around was that whatever solution would need to be acceptable to the Americans, and the American position was self-contradictory. Our problem was that we needed the money; theirs that their conditions for paying it out were mutually exclusive. The US wanted free trade (although not for things it wanted to protect like agriculture), but that implied either substantial currency flexibility or the US supplying the rest of the world with liquidity. The US wanted stable currencies, but those implied either US financing or else either concessions on trade, or clearing restrictions that amounted to concessions on trade. And the US wanted multilateral payments without bilateral clearing, but that implied either US financing, floating currencies, or concessions on trade. It was a preview, really, of the famous open economy trilemma.

An important point was that different bits of the US government cared about different elements of the problem. The State Department cared passionately about free trade but not so much about currencies or payments. The US Treasury cared intensely about currencies and was willing to give ground on trade. Both of these were relatively open to paying into the system. Congress didn’t really care about free trade or currencies, in fact some of it was actively hostile to free trade and formed an alliance with the Vice-Presidency and the Department of Agriculture against it, but it did very much want to limit how much money the US had to chip in.

On the British side, an important feature of the Schachtian vs Multilateralist debate was that the two camps cut across everything else in British politics. The multilateralist camp included hardcore classical liberals like Lionel Robbins of LSE, for whom free trade was really the only issue that mattered. It included people who wanted a multilateral solution because it promised enough international liquidity for the UK to stand off American demands to break up the sterling area and demand unilateral free trade. It included European and world federalists who saw Bretton Woods as a step towards world integration. It included Keynes, who wanted a multilateral solution at this stage because it promised a managed world economy.

On the other hand, the Schachtian camp included imperialists who wanted to break with the US and create a separate imperial economic unit, radical left-wing voices who wanted to do something similar as an exit from world capitalism (and perhaps a prelude to inviting the USSR to join), and some proto-Europeans who wanted to build on the fact many of the European allies were sterling-area countries. Roughly, the Treasury came down on the multilateral side and the Bank of England on the Schachtian.

One way of reading British history since then is that the multilateralists won, but were repeatedly disappointed by their partners’ commitment to multilateralism. What we might call Bretton Woods version 1.0 never really took off precisely because the US didn’t want to finance it until the emerging Cold War forced them to relaunch it with both more European integration and more US money. Later, although the Schachtians were some of the loudest voices against joining the EEC, some of the most influential voices inside government were those of multilateralists who hoped for a worldwide free trade area via GATT and via the special relationship. But this never happened, because nobody (especially not the US) wanted it that much. It did, however, leave a rhetorical legacy of arguments against the European project that seek to characterise it as a Schachtian/protectionist exercise contrasted to world multilateralism.

The interesting thing here is that Schachtian thinking didn’t go away. It continued to exist under the ice of the multilateral hegemony, for example in the late 1970s protectionist turn of left-wing economic thinking that enduringly shaped people like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. And it shapes the Brexit camp’s understanding of trade, however much they protest their liberal multilateralism. Boris Johnson arrives on a shiny boat with a delegation of dignitaries and signs for a handful of big ticket contracts under a “deal” with a named country. It’s all very Schachtian; very different from the reality of many, many individual transactions between thousands of firms. It’s bilateral, it’s politicised, and it’s heavily biased to big ticket contracts for big business. After all, one of the multilateral criticisms of Schachtianism was precisely that it was part of the so-called managerial revolution.

Somehow, we ended up with multilateralism in charge and trying to justify itself in Schachtian terms against a Schachtian insurgency that justifies itself in multilateral ones.

Quick campaign post

This Chris Cook piece about campaigning strategy is good. Here’s something I noticed which he doesn’t call out specifically. The party leaders’ activities by ITV region are actually very similar. Going by Chris’s table, Theresa May has made 23 visits and Jeremy Corbyn 22. Both leaders have concentrated their operations on two regions, Greater London and the West Midlands. May visited Central 5 times, as did Corbyn. She appeared in London 5 times, while Corbyn did so 6 times. In total, Corbyn’s visits to these two regions represent half his total, while May’s represent 44% of hers. The distinction should not be treated as particularly important, as it’s accounted for by precisely two visits. I would cautiously support Cook’s contention that he’s trying to get on the regional news as often as possible with an enthusiastic turnout of activists by going to seats where there is a good membership base. This at least turns his meetings to some use. Alternatively he actually expects the Labour share of the vote to be up on last time – look at the concentration of visits around a 5% swing. That would be…brave?

The NHS hack and GCHQ

It looks like the worldwide ransomware attack on Windows XP machines originates from one of the exploits in the so-called Shadow Brokers dump, a collection of exploits developed or bought by the NSA. Oliver Rivers asks: Where was GCHQ?

Well, the answer is more like: Where was CESG? Or LCSA? Through the Second World War and the Cold War, the UK maintained a structural distinction between the agency responsible for collecting signals intelligence on its enemies, and the one responsible for protecting its own systems from them. During WW2, the centre of offensive signals intelligence was at Bletchley Park, as everyone knows. It drew on resources from the secret services, from the Foreign Office, from the RAF Signals Branch’s Y Service, and from the Royal Navy. Army SIGINT became more important in the cold war.

There was also, however, a centre in London devoted to what we would now call security assurance. This agency, known as the London Communications Security Agency (or Group, or Service, or Centre – it got reorganised a lot), had the job of verifying the security of cryptographic systems developed by everyone else. As it happened, the biggest such project of the war was Rockex, created by the radio-focused Section VIII of Special Operations Executive to communicate with their spies in occupied Europe and the Far East. Rockex turned out so well that the military turned to it to distribute the intercepts from Bletchley Park to commanders in the field, and the Foreign Office used it for diplomatic communications worldwide.

We kept going rather like this. The development, and operation, of cryptographic systems was decentralised. The military, and the secret services, and industry built things, while the defensive security group (whose name changed all the time) defined standards they had to comply with and provided expert support. On the other hand, the offensive GCHQ spied on HM Enemies, however defined.

There is not a hard line between their functions. For a start, they share common technology. If you want to provide information security assurance, you need to be able to test it, which means you’re capable of spying. The technology of information security is supremely dual-use. But this is also true of classical intelligence. Kim Philby headed the counter-intelligence branch of MI6, the spies responsible for spying on the other lot’s spies. The defensive side would like to know about the attackers; the attackers often find out first from the defence.

Classical human intelligence agencies usually are divided up this way. SIGINT agencies are a bit different. GCHQ has, since 1941, had the sole right to brief the prime minister outside the Joint Intelligence Committee process with a selection of its choicest takes. This reflects an important truth about its work. SIGINT is the steroid of intelligence – whatever you think of it, whatever it does to your democratic health, it makes you stronger. It may not make you smarter, but if there is an effective crypto break of some sort, it will deliver you the other side’s literal words. Also, it can deliver quickly. One of the greatest achievements of Bletchley Park was to deliver decrypts in close to real time. In a nuclear world, this is desperately valuable.

As a result, they have always wanted to be an integral fourth service, pulling all the resources together, making their unique access and capability worth something. This was consummated in the UK when the London-based security functions were rolled into GCHQ when the new building in Cheltenham opened back in the Blair years. Terribly, something similar has happened in NSA since Edward Snowden went on the run.

The problem here is that the two missions conflict. When the offensive mission discovers something, its incentive is to hoard it. This is the hoard recently leaked. When the defensive mission discovers something, its incentive is to fix it. But only the offensive one gets to brief the prime minister. Only the offensive one drops startling insights into startling people onto the prime minister’s desk. The defensive mission can hope only for peace, and the appreciation of its professional peers so long as it is allowed to tell them. Its world is more adult, more intrinsic in motivation, more genuine in its commitment to public service. It is like the justification that the offensive side uses for its sins.

It is fairly clear that the offensive side will win the agency’s internal politics so long as the two are forced to live in the same fishtank. This cohabitation is, however, optional and somehow we did without it when it mattered most. Free CESG!

The NHS hack and technical debt

So the NHS got hacked. Jeremy Hunt saved £5m a year in payments for extended Microsoft support and now look what’s happened. This reminded me of something important.

Software engineers have a concept of “technical debt” that is worth remembering. Technical debt arises when you decide to put some work off to the future, so you can get on with something more important in the moment. So there was that annoying bug, but you thought it was more important to finish the integration with Salesforce and your customers definitely thought so. You knew you needed to do the security audit, but there were all those bugs to tackle. You wouldn’t have designed the whole thing this way, had you known anyone would use it, but rebuilding the core of the application? There are more immediate concerns.

It’s like debt for a number of reasons. First of all, you’ve got to pay it off in the end. If you don’t do the security audit, one day you’ll be on the news. If you don’t do the big redesign, one day you’ll hit some sort of limit. If you don’t keep up with the maintenance, one day the whole project will just be too crufty to advance further.

Secondly, though, the optimal level of technical debt is not necessarily zero. Debt is useful. We incur technical debt when we choose to prioritise some tasks over others. This allows us to commit more of our resources to goals we consider important, on condition we eventually get after the others. This has an important consequence.

An organisation can put up with more technical debt if its ability to pay it off – to fix it – is also growing. If the inventory of deferred work grows faster than the capability to do it, though, it’s heading for ruin.

And finally, as with any kind of debt, it’s very important to recognise that it exists and to account for it. One of the best ways to give a false impression of success in business is to find a way to borrow without accounting for it. Leverage increases returns.

With technical debt, you’re essentially borrowing from yourself. The flow of cash that would otherwise have been used to retire the technical debt is available for some other purpose. This looks like there’s been a saving – a reduction in the actual costs of doing business. But in fact, there is no saving. Work that needs doing has not been done. It will need doing in the future. Swapping future money for money today is the very definition of debt.

As I say, the optimal level of technical debt is not zero. But let’s think about this more broadly.

When institutions want to save, especially governments, the first thing they do is cancel big capital projects. That’s easy – they are well defined lump sums. The second thing they do, though, is to cancel maintenance. The nice thing about cancelling maintenance is that stuff usually works for quite a while. You have the cash, and the repayment is in the future. Debt, see? And wonderfully, you don’t need to book it anywhere. When John Major privatised the railways, Railtrack plc reduced the track mileage it replaced annually by two-thirds. Not surprisingly, it managed to pay dividends right up to the bitter end, borrowing from its assets by running up technical debt.

So. Remember when the fella said he was fixing the roof while the sun was shining?