Book Review

Review: "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" by Bruce Schneier

June 6, 2015 by Strife Staff

By: Christy Quinn:

Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World.
New York, NY: W.W. Norton., 2015. Pp. 400. £ 17.99, ISBN: 978-0-393-24481-6.

If you’re not familiar with the Information Security community in the IT industry, it’s worth knowing that Bruce Schneier has earned the reputation of a prophet, sage and action hero combined. As a renowned cryptologist and technologist, Schneier has been a leading critic of the US government’s attempts to limit the global spread of encryption and recently of the NSA’s ‘bulk collection’ program of communication records of US citizens, following the disclosures by Edward Snowden in 2013. Data and Goliath, his latest book, addresses the challenge posed to privacy and individual liberty posed by both government “mass surveillance” and the exponential amounts of personal information collected by the private sector for profit.

One of the strongest insights to come from Data and Goliath is the symbiotic relationship between the commercial data gathering on users from private businesses and the arms of government security. Some of the more hysterical attacks on government surveillance perpetrated by crypto-anarchist campaigners like Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum have suggested that the Snowden revelations are evidence of the US government as an all-powerful police state with no physical or legal restrictions on its capability to reach into the lives of every person utilising digital communications around the world. Schneier suggests that many governments actually depend on private companies for data on their customers they gather for their own benefit in any case, and then either pay them for the privilege of collecting it or require it in return for market access. For example, telecommunications provider Vodafone provides approximately 29 countries direct access to internet traffic passing through their borders. In return, private companies are paying for more access to government records on citizens, such as drivers license data or anonymised health records, to enhance their own services. One of the results of the digital communication era has been the commodification of personal data, both as a means of national security and for private profit.

The crucial point of contention is whether the collection of customer data, often referred to as ‘metadata’, constitutes “mass surveillance”. One of the problems of establishing the nature of surveillance is the many different forms of metadata, which can vary considerably in the amount they tell you about the life of the individual. Schneier gives the example of telephony metadata, better known as call records. These do not give the collector the content of the call but instead the number dialed, the date of the call and the length of the call. A Stanford University study quoted by Schneier was able to establish considerable detail about the private lives of the anonymous participants from their call records alone, such as whether they were planning an abortion or growing marijuana in their own home. CIA director Michael Hayden, who is quoted in the book, is unequivocal about its value to US security; “we kill people based on metadata.”

However, this definition of metadata varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; while in the US, the terms used in Google searches are treated by the NSA as metadata, in the UK they are treated under surveillance laws as ‘content’ which requires a warrant from the Home Secretary to access. The changing nature of many online services also masks them from government bulk collection. For example, if the UK government was monitoring your Facebook activity on a passive bulk collection basis, rather than actively spying on you, in theory they would only be able to see that your IP address logged on to Facebook’s online website. Without a warrant, they would not be able to see your friend’s list, any messages you made within your Facebook network or which group pages you visited. Facebook, on the other hand, would have full access to your personal data, which they can utilise to sell advertising to you and would be obliged to hand over were they issued with a warrant. Messages from users outside the UK to users in the UK could qualify for bulk collection, but only if they were deemed ’necessary and proportionate’ under surveillance laws. Other jurisdictions such as Russia and China make no such nice distinctions and seek the ‘full take’ of a user’s internet activity, legalistic niceties be damned.

This results in a confusing picture, particularly as the proportion of metadata collected and analysed by governments remains to be national secrets. The recent backlash against bulk collection of telephony metadata in the US has resulted in the fall of the Patriot Act, of one of the pillars of the post 9/11 national security state. Bruce Schneier’s book is an excellent contribution to the debate over internet surveillance and is an ideal education as to how the processes of personal data collection work. However, it is clear that this debate is far from over and that ultimately users will have to come to terms with how much of their personal lives they are willing to disclose to others.

Christy Quinn studied International History at the London School of Economics & Political Science and is currently reading for an MA in Intelligence & International Security at Kings College London. His research interests are cyber security, national security strategy and the Asia-Pacific region. He is a Guest Editor at Strife. Follow him @ChristyQuinn

The Hizbullah Phenomenon

December 31, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Mohammad I. Aslam:

Lina Khatib, Dina Mater and Atef Alshaer, The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication, Published by Hurst, 2014. New from £18.84 (Amazon paperback). ISBN: 1849043353.

In Hizbullah: Politics and Communication, a trio of authors endeavour to shine light on the evolutionary transformation of arguably the most powerful sub-state political and military movement in the Middle East, Hizbullah. They do this by dissecting its sophisticated political communications strategy.

The authors, evidently aware that most previous studies on the Hizbullah movement have tended to focus on its cultural, ideological, military and political paradigms, attempt to bridge a gap in the analysis of the movement by focusing on how the dexterous use of mass communication goes hand in hand with its nearly 30 years of exponential growth.

The main gist of the narrative is therefore designed to furnish readers with a corollary of descriptive examples demonstrating how the movement was able to not only successfully remain relevant through turbulent times, wars and civil upheavals, but to propagate into a global movement in the process.

The authors attempt to accomplish this by analysing and connecting segments of Hizbullah’s elaborate interplay of culture, image, language and self-presentation on the one hand, and spectacular military and political campaigns on the other.

In addition to this, a sizeable and crucial concentration is given to the movement’s most successful propagator of political communication, its Secretary-General, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, whom the authors quite rightly view as giving the movement a sense of exaltation and infallibility.

Other essential factors which are given credence are the movement’s central messages of “victimisation”, a successful penetration into archenemy Israel’s political and military establishment, and Hizbullah’s emphasis on nationalism, which is aligned with the group’s political progression.

The book has many strengths. Firstly, the authors are all Middle Eastern with expertise in media studies, and are thus able to provide readers with a better understanding of the complexities and emotions that are inherent in Arab audiences – and for that matter confessional groups in Lebanon of which the Hizbullah-supporting Shiites happen to be the largest.

Secondly, and despite generally appearing to be complimentary of Hizbullah’s communicative efforts, all three authors are clearly scholars with no personal interest or stake in the movement’s message. This is vital to ensure a balanced and concise view of its communicative success and failures.

The final chapter of the book keeps audiences aware that despite an impressive run of communicating its political message across the country (and even internationally to a certain extent), apparent shortcomings and weaknesses in this otherwise very successful strategy have become more noticeable. In particular, the movement’s media strategy designed to justify its support of the incumbent regime in Syria has not been selling well with Arab audiences.

Overall, the book is a diligent piece of media analysis and one that deserves the attention of those interested in the nonlinear communicative strategies of powerful sub-state actors like Hizbullah.

Mohammad I. Aslam is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the institute of Middle-Eastern Studies, Kings College London. His research analyses the Political and Military dynamics of Lebanese Hezbollah.

Cyber Security in China

November 7, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Christy Quinn:

Greg Austin, Cyber Policy in China. China Today. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2014. Pp. 232. £ 15.99, paperback; £50.00, hardback; £10.99, e-book. ISBN: 978-0-7456-6979-3.

From the emergence of the printing press in Early Modern Europe, to the expansion of global satellite television and the internet,the state has always been on the back foot in trying to control the spread and content of information and maintain its monopoly over the control of information within its sovereign borders. There is nothing new about balancing the societal benefits of information-sharing with maintaining state power.

What has changed in the last decade is proof of the unique qualities and vulnerabilities of electronically-stored information: both the strengthening of the state’s ability to harvest information through the bulk collection of electronic data, and the weakening of the state’s ability to keep information secret and control its flow across borders. Cyberspace offers unique challenges to state power. Greg Austin’s Cyber Policy in China provides an informed perspective on the experience of arguably the world’s most empowered state in both harnessing the potential of, but also controlling, the hugely disruptive changes that cyberspace brings, providing an explanation through recent Chinese history and its current policy direction.

Austin focuses on an overlooked and misunderstood aspect of a fundamental change in mindset in Chinese leadership following the death of Mao in 1976: the shift from waging war against an information-based society through purges and ideological education, to putting the full strength of the state economy into creating an information-based society, thus placing information technology at the centre of the future economy.

The Cultural Revolution and the systematic destruction of the intellectual classes in China had demonstrated to Deng Xiaoping the potential for the state monopoly over information to decimate the knowledge base on which the economy depended. The alternative vision offered by the Californian futurist Alvin Toffler in his book ‘The Third Wave’ was striking in its contradiction to Maoism. Toffler argued that the development of an ‘informatized’ society through mastering telecommunication technologies offered a way to fundamentally rebalance the relationship between the people and state, and propel China to global leadership. The book was a bestseller in China in 1983 and was reputedly studied by both Deng and the reformist Premier Zhao Ziyang.

At the same time, however, the Party invested a huge quantity of resources into creating an unprecedented cyber apparatus for information control, known popularly as the ‘Great Firewall of China’, in order to mitigate any threat to its political monopoly. Austin’s analysis aptly demonstrates the contradictions of seeking to reap the socio-economic benefits of an information-based society and economy, and the ‘i-Dictatorship’ that is undermining the values of trusted information and innovation upon which the whole edifice sits.

One of the most striking insights within in the book is how the ‘Dictatorship’ has undermined trust in information on a societal level by devaluing and denying space for any information intruding on the political sphere. Austin argues that the dearth of public information outside of the oft-discounted official media and the state obsession with curtailing the spread of viral posts on social media has led to a ‘country awash in supposition, half-credible news stories and libel’.[i]

An example is the attempt by state officials to censor death tolls of schoolchildren killed by the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. This demonstrates how the self-preservation instinct of the party cadres have routinely deprived the public of trustworthy information. The Party’s obsession with curtailing rumours and falsehoods online only points to how starved the Chinese media market is of illuminating information on current affairs, and is further evidence of the barriers China faces in reaching the full innovative potential of an informatized society whilst constrained by the strait-jacket of political control.

Another key contradiction in China’s informatization strategy illuminated by Austin’s research is how the actions of state security services have systematically undermined information security across the information ecosystem. Despite the Ministry of Public Security’s legislative focus on tackling the threat of cyber-crime to the Chinese economy, it has curtailed the development of information security such as encryption standards, education and technology adoption by using public security and state secrecy arguments. This has contributed to a strong state but a weak information ecosystem that is plagued by phishing bank scams and has resulted in 14 million IP addresses being infected by Trojans or Botnets.[ii]

Moreover, Austin points out that this weakness in protecting personal information has begun to extend to Chinese elites, as demonstrated by the Bloomberg News exposé of the hidden wealth of the Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao’s extended families. It is arguable then that the inherent contradictions of the ‘i-Dictatorship’ in protecting the Party’s privileged position but neglecting personal privacy has created a toxic information ecosystem with the potential to destabilise China’s political economy in the long run.

Austin also examines how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has struggled to adapt to informatisation across their organisation while at the same time investing heavily in cyber espionage. His assessment of the PLA’s strategic anxieties of falling behind in a destabilisingcyber-arms race with the US is a welcome reminder of the value of directly engaging with institutions to ask them what they think, rather than operating in a research vacuum.

He takes a critical view of the conventional media narrative of the PLA overseeing the ‘largest illicit transfer of wealth in human history’[iii] through espionage targeting private companies in the West and transferring commercially-sensitive information to Chinese state industries. Instead he argues that the PLA is mainly focused on military intelligence collection and science and technology research useful to developing China’s military capabilities. This view is refreshing but requires a more detailed analysis to be convincing, especially as it contradicts other well-regarded reports on the activities of the now infamous PLA Unit 61398 in aggressive cyber attacks.[iv]

One of the text’s strengths is the time dedicated to analysing the hundreds of official policy documents and declarations issued by the dozens of party committees overseeing China’s industry, security and education sectors. These give readers a level of depth and context into the Party’s official stances and aspirations which can be compared against the state’s performance. The downside to this approach is the uncertainty of how much weight we should assign to official pronouncements, which aspire to all of the ideal values that Austin prescribes for an information society, while the Party has run roughshod over them in practice. In other words, does the Party really believe in what it says?

This book offers much through its dissection of the Chinese information state, yet raises more questions as to its direction. Whether China under Xi Jinping will try to realise Toffler’s dream of a fundamental rebalance in the relationship between the people and state through information technology, or instead drive the information society towards further security control and secrecy, will reveal much about the direction of the Chinese state.

For further information on the book, listen to a discussion the War Studies Department at King’s College held a with the author.

___________________

Christy studied International History at the London School of Economics & Political Science and is currently reading for an MA in Intelligence & International Security at Kings College London. His research interests are cyber security, national security strategy and the Asia-Pacific region. He is a Guest Editor at Strife.

NOTES

[i]Greg Austin, Cyber Policy in China (London: Wiley, 2014), p.80
[ii]Ibid, p.78
[iii]Ibid, p.139
[iv]MANDIANT (2013). APT1: ‘Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units’. Accessed at http://intelreport.mandiant.com/Mandiant_APT1_Report.pdf

The strife of finding oneself, or a trip through the House of the Dead: Review of The Charnel House

October 21, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Pablo de Orellana:

In a foray into the relationship between art and conflict, editor Pablo de Orellana reviews The Charnel House, a poetic graphic novel by painter Tom de Freston in collaboration with 37 leading contemporary poets, a book that takes readers through an agonising exploration of knowledge about oneself –and the problems of identity and its recognition.

* * *

‘I watched myself falling for nine nights’, a line from The Charnel House, speaks of the plight of its protagonist and of the author’s spectacular development over the past year. De Freston’s last exhibition at London’s Breese-Little Gallery (November 2013-January 2014, see catalogue here) was comprised of paintings whose characters are calmly observed by the author in despair, degradation and displacement. They were sad, yes, but portrayed in compositions suggesting narrative, framing a spectacle of unbridled despair. De Freston’s characters reach a climax of exasperated frustration, and yet the works provide the means for viewers to frame despair, highlighting its all-too-human insularity.

The Charnel House book features many of the same images in graphic novel format. Punctuated by poems by 37 leading authors such as John Mole and George Szirtes, the storyboard highlights deeper narratives in the images themselves. A character finds himself resembling a Guernica-like horsehead character and sets out in an angst-ridden quest for understanding of his condition. The narrative drags us through all of “Horsehead’s” existence: love, sex, family, loss, painting, a gallery show and even waterboarding and beheading. The paintings and images themselves more than ever depend upon theatrical staging to provide position, sense and visual continuity to great effect.

You-can-make-it-drink — Tom de Freston, You can make it drink, 200x150cm, oil on canvas, 2013

The violence that aesthetically constitutes the narrative acts in this journey of self-discovery is what fascinates me the most. These instances of violence point to the moments of transition and choice of identification in relation to horsehead’s own politics of who he should be. This violence denoted through the moments when horsehead hates, loves and reconsiders himself, and the inevitable questions that arise at each instance. Furthermore, for those of us that inquire into the constitution of political identity, de Freston provides a fascinating set of isolated visual markers that challenge how we come to recognise identity –gestures, scenes, poses and dress. In sum, how Horsehead recognises himself, the markers that tell him who he is and how they contrast with whom he should be, poses a serious challenge to the ideational stability of identity. Remembering and retrieving who you are, as Horsehead finds out, is a problem.

Tom de Freston, Diana, 200x150cm, oil on canvas, 2013

These moments in which Horsehead addresses his condition are exacerbated by the structure of this exercise in ekphrasis, when the reader’s aesthetic eye is challenged by the textual response. Highlights among the poems responding to the artwork are ‘The Hunger Moon’ by Helen Ivory and ‘Illumination’ by Alan Buckley. The latter in particular denotes the exploratory (and violently desolate) mission of this aesthetic journey though human experience.

The Charnel House is a spectacular painterly journey through a character attempting to find himself through the horrors of his own soul. All in one house and one night.

____________________

Pablo de Orellana is Senior Editor of Strife and a Doctoral researcher at the War Studies Department, King’s College London. His interests include diplomacy, critical theory, nationalism, part-taking in democracy and contemporary fine art.

Tom de Freston’s The Charnel House, published by Bridgedoor Press, is available in hardback and also as an e-book.

Book review: Music Wars, 1937-1945

June 19, 2014 by Strife Staff

Patrick Bade, The Music Wars, 1937-1945. East & West Publishing, London, 2012. Pp. vii, 440. £17.36. ISBN-10: 1907318070.

The author, Patrick Bade, has worked at Christie’s Education, London, since 1981, where his expertise spans the visual arts and music. He has written extensively across varying artistic topics in an accessible and non-academic style. The Music Wars is no exception.

The ideal consumer of this book is the person who is interested in learning how music affected the Second World War in the political and cultural spheres, and conversely, how the war affected music. If you are searching for a purely academic thesis that comprehensively covers all aspects of music during the Second World War, then look elsewhere. If, though, you are interested in an introduction to the topic, Bade does a good job at delivering that. He has neither the time nor space to be all things to all readers, and we must appreciate that limitation. In the forward to his book, Bade acknowledges that he has chosen to focus his book on ‘…France, Britain, and the German Reich and occupied territories. The United States and the Soviet Union are largely viewed from a Western and Central European perspective. I was particularly intrigued by the clash of musical cultures in North Africa and the Middle East. This is something I hope to be able to explore in the future.

There is undoubtedly an interesting book to be written about the role of music in the Pacific and Far Eastern theatres of war, but not by me.’ (p. vi) Bade has clearly dictated the parameters of his research and therefore cannot be cited in his inability to address all aspects of music during the Second World War. The author distinguishes his own book to those of other wartime era music histories in that ‘…the primary source material is recorded sound. It is a sign of the astonishing times in which we live that I was able to listen to almost every one of the thousands of recordings cited in this book without leaving my own home.’ (p. v) He also relies on his own personal collection of music memorabilia augmented with a singular trip to the newspaper archives in North London. Additionally, ‘flea markets across Europe provided a valuable source of printed material.’ (p. vi)

The author begins the book with an overview of ‘Music: The Miracle Weapon’ in which he discusses Radio Paris at the height of the German occupation of 1944 and the usage of radio as a medium through which music was utilized as a propaganda tool. Throughout the book, Bade focuses on classical music and not the clichéd Glenn Milleresque swing dance music that is so often associated with the Second World War. Bade progresses to analyse orchestral concerts during the German Reich, where Bade’s typically colourful language describes a meeting in Berlin with the conductor Toscanini and others in which ‘…the atmosphere must have been crackling with musical testosterone.’ (p. 109) Bade continues with an overview of various geographic areas including the United States, with its influx of wartime ‘refugee conductors.’ (p. 156) The classical music scene in Russia was increasingly complex since, ‘After the outbreak of the war between Germany and Russia, the performance of Russian music was banned in the German Reich, while that of Sibelius, the national composer of Russia’s enemy Finland, which had never been as popular in Germany as it was in Britain and America, was now encouraged. A German Sibelius society was set up early in 1942 on the initiative of Goebbels.’ (p. 175)

In Britain, the classical music scene was problematic as, unlike Germany, in Britain there were ‘…no state-subsidized opera houses and only two more or less permanent houses, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, both in London. At the outbreak of war, both closed for opera and did not re-open till 1945.’ (p. 191) There were, though, private operatic ventures such as the Russian Opera Company that formed in 1941 to entertain wartime Britain and performed at such independent venues as the Savoy Theatre. (p. 195) Musicians’ performances within underground air raid shelters during the Blitz are also mentioned as a way in which music added to the wartime experience for the average citizen.

Bade then paints a picture of the musical scene in North Africa, and the Middle East, about which he states, ‘Along the fault line between Western and Islamic cultures from Lebanon to Morocco, Europeans and Arabs were introduced to one another’s musical traditions during the war. However, music often proved to be a dividing rather than a uniting factor. With increasing numbers of European refugees arriving in Palestine in the 1930s, the Jewish community in Palestine became an important outpost of Western musical culture.’ (p. 225)

Lastly, the author devotes an entire chapter to music in camps. He states, ‘No previous war in history had seen so many men and women locked up for such long periods. Tens of millions found themselves in internment camps, prisoner of war camps, concentration camps and extermination camps. There was music in all of them.’ (p. 247) Bade describes the ever-present nature of music in camps and how music was generally executed by prisoners. ‘It is astonishing,’ Bade writes, ‘How much music was composed in captivity.’ (p. 248) Not only is it astonishing in regard to the amount of music generated but also with the breadth of music across nations during the Second World War, a legacy that is often overlooked by historians. Bade has successfully addressed this issue in The Music Wars.

Jennifer Daley
King’s College London

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