The headline on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal read “Iran Arms Syria with Radar [sic]“.  My orthographic quibbles about the proper spelling of RADAR notwithstanding, the article quotes officials who say the new RADAR could pose a security threat to Israel.  No doubt it could.  The point of the article is that this level of military and technology “cooperation” constitutes a serious security threat.  No doubt it does.

Wall Street Journal, from Getty Images

One fact missing from the story was that the Syrians had already spent huge amounts on their air defenses—billions, by some estimates¹.  And as the former US top cybersecurity official, Richard Clarke, points out in his new book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, those investments had failed spectacularly.  Clarke those reiterated last night at the Aspen Institute Security Forum that the challenge of cybersecurity lies in the manner in which it levels the playing field in such unexpected ways.  In the case of the briefly infamous 2008 Israeli air raid on the North Korean-designed (and operated?) Syrian nuclear facility, the Syrian RADAR systems appear to have been shut down before a single Israeli shot was fired:  someone (the Israelis, we presume) hacked the Syrian RADAR networks caused them either not to detect the F-15s and F-16s overhead, or not to display them.  (Neither of those aircraft is stealthy;  there is no question the RADARs could have detected them.)  Perhaps the first public acknowledgment of cyberwar in a modern military action followed, as first publicly reported by David A. Fulghum, Robert Wall and Amy Butler (“Israel Shows Electronic Prowess,” in Aviation Week).

So one wonders about this WSJ story:  why are the Syrians buying new RADAR equipment instead of new firewalls and routers?  Well, perhaps they are….

1. Clarke, Richard A. and Robert K. Knake, Cyber War, Harper Collins, 2010

Think it’s far-fetched?  Perhaps, but as last week’s news that the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Al-Bashir shows, the issue of state sovreignity (especially for senior members of the executive branch) remains very much a paradox for The Hague.  (See this on-point but somewhat dry article in the European Journal of International Law.)  While some of us may rest on our first world laurels and be content to watch the ICC indict the Sudanese president and thereby attract the collective disapproval of the Arab League as a result, we shouldn’t rest too easily:  it’s not quite so different for Harris’s retired Prime Minister to see his own name on an ICC arrest warrant—and escape it only by calling upon the US (ex parte to the court and at whose bidding the fictional PM performed his actions) to save his skin.  Is Harris’s fictional PM simply a thinly veiled portrait of the very real-life Tony Blair, against whom similar claims have been made?  You be the judge (or let British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft do so for you in his Slate article).  Clever writing indeed.  Let’s hope it remains fiction.

One needn’t spend much time browsing in The Bazaar before you realize: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. He is not the first to report that the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer particularly hard to come by. (You may not quite be able to download the plans off the Internet, but the basic “gun” model used in the Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb is fairly easy to construct from the right amount of Uranium 235.) Thus for a long time, the world has relied for its nonproliferative intentions on the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of weapons-grade U235 (loosely defined as uranium whose 235 isotope is present at >90% by mass). Building centrifuges requires far more engineering and machining expertise than does building the actual bomb, and Western nonproliferation efforts (and the IAEA‘s efforts) have thus focused on nipping the process in the materials production bud.

Blame it on the leaky Russians (Langewiesche convinces us that they had little, if anything to do with nuclear proliferation) or the incredibly trusting Dutch, who initially hired A. Q. Kahn and later let him waltz out of the country with the plans for what are still considered state-of-the-art uranium centrifuges (state-of-the-non-classified-art, I should say), or the Pakistan government, which first propped up Kahn and which later bowed to US pressure to arrest him—and then promptly locked him away under house arrest so that no Western intelligence services could ask any further awkward questions relating to the involvement of the Pakistani government itself—but no matter how you slice it, not only has nuclear knowledge proliferated, but therefore so has nuclear technology. The North Koreans, the Iranians and the Libyans now also have the know-how (if not the machines, in the case of newly-reformed Libya) to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and of course so do the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Israelis (not officially , the Germans, the French, the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the US. That’s roughly half the world’s population (50.6%, to be precise) whose governments are known have access to nuclear weapons technology. A majority.

Thus I conclude that the nonproliferation agenda is bankrupt. So far as we know, we have kept these weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. But such was not the aim of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty! In order to create effective controls which might curb the transfer of nuclear technologies to non-state actors, we’ll have to start by identifying what didn’t work in the NPT—for starters, the overt inequity between the nations permitted to maintain such weapons (namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council) and those not permitted to do so. The NPT created second-class citizens of half the world. Any surprise the world didn’t abide by the treaty? It’s Versaille all over again: a Phyrric victory of an asymmetric treaty over geopolitical reality.

So much for sleeping tonight.

(click for the full mosaic, 1,300+ books in all!)

Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do. But it highlighted a few things about my changing “digital existence” that I thought were worth reporting:

So Much Data
First and foremost, all of this data (the books, the covers, and even the photo I turned into the mosaic) were available with a few minutes worth of work. Admittedly, I had previously spent hours scanning the ISBN bar codes on my books (conveniently when packing my books in order to move to my new apartment). But think about the amount of data available to me for very little investment: the titles, authors, and graphic images of 1,300 some-odd books, along with their associated meta-data (length, ISBN, etc.). When I was in school (ending in the mid ’90s), gathering and manipulating this sort of data was certainly possible, but doing so was the domain of database experts, programmers, and the like. So I became one of those, mostly because I saw the computer as a tool which would facilitate information manipulation of a nature never previously possible−or indeed imagined.
Trumbull College, My residential college at Yale, for example, had a library boasting some 5,000 works. Its card catalog was positively ancient and poorly maintained. Estimates for the workload involved in cataloging it and keeping it up-to-date were so substantial that the (volunteer) project never got off the ground. A mere fifteen years later, my catalog is not only mostly up-to-date, but it contains all manner of “rich content” that a card catalog could not muster: images of the covers, other books by the same author, publication history, and of course the meta-data: reviews, social/popularity information, and even feedstock for inference and recommendation engines.

Community Creativity
Then there is the accessibility of the inspiration. LibraryThing cleverly suggested the mosaic and linked to David Louis Edelman‘s post in which he created a similar mosaic. Call it community scrapbooking, community arts and crafts, or simply community creativity, but this sort of cross-country “we all trade inspiration” is unusual, to say the least. To be sure, historically artist communes and even local arts and crafts fairs historically provided fodder and inspiration for our individual creativity, but this is a different kind of inspiration: it is both more instantaneous (I got the idea late last night; got a full night’s rest; and woke up and produced the mosaic before breakfast this morning) and more eclectic (David is a computer programmer and Science Fiction author in the Washington, DC area; I am a technology company CEO in Silicon Valley).

But Silos—Still
Unfortunately, it’s not all wine and roses. LibraryThing is the site I’ve always used to catalog my books, but recently Visual Bookshelf has won many converts, mostly because they have embraced the Facebook Platform API and have created a Facebook application. Since some 500 of my friends are on Facebook, and since many of them are avid readers, Visual Bookshelf has already netted me 40 some-odd “reading buddies” (which I define as other people I am friends with on Facebook and who have Visual Bookshelf profiles). An 8% cross-over rate isn’t bad, especially when you consider that Visual Bookshelf is only one of hundreds of Facebook applications. (And, for that matter, it’s one of the least annoying, since it doesn’t spam the hell out of your friends.) Here, for example, is my bookshelf, as displayed on Facebook, and what my friends are reading:

Unfortunately, I cannot synchronize my book activity on Visual Bookshelf with my LibraryThing account. Visual Bookshelf finally implemented a LibraryThing import feature, but it’s unidirectional. Likewise, Facebook makes it nearly impossible to export friend information (going so far as to display email addresses as images to foil screen scrapers and other brute force export tools). So I’m stuck maintaining two databases and importing one to the other, potentially over-writing or losing information each time I do so.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem, and it is but one example of the growing “problem” of social networking data living in proprietary silos. Such well-known Web 2.0 commentators as Om Malik have even gone so far as to propose that social networking features will end up getting built into most desktop and web software, much the same way as the Cut/Copy/Paste mechanism has become a de facto paradigm standard. But that will only work if the core social networking information (who is who and who knows whom) does not remain the proprietary information of, e.g., Facebook. Technologies from the simple XFN to the ambitious OpenSocial are supposed to fix that, but OpenSocial appears almost to have been promulgated by Google to compete with Facebook, and it will be a chilly day in the netherworld before Facebook adopts it. More recently, the DataPortability Working Group has been graced by the participation of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others (or at least representatives from those companies). But until something concrete develops, we early adopters will continue to enjoy the benefits of So Much Data and Community Creativity, but only if we’re willing to put up with duplicate data, lost data, and the other assorted horrors of manual synchronization.

All told, the information revolution continues in directions we never could have anticipated. Here I am trading notes with friends I haven’t physically seen in over a decade, enjoying better book recommendations from the wisdom of my friends (and the crowds) than I do by poking around my local bookstore, and finding a nice Sunday morning arts and crafts project inspired by a Washington, DC science fiction author whom I’ve never met.

Now if only I didn’t have to keep three copies of it all!

As its title suggests, Shashi’s newest book focuses on the ongoing transformation of his homeland. (In an interesting aside, Shashi points out that the cover of his book in its US edition, shown below, bears an almost cliched illustration of a Hindu God—which I take to be Ganesh—holding a tiger in one hand and a cell phone in the other, but the Indian edition shows a real photograph of a Hindu Sanyashi—a monk—sitting on his bicycle, making a cell phone call.) In particular, Shashi related a couple of anecdotes which gave me some idea of just how profound the impact of modernity has been on India. One is worth re-telling: as recently as 1984, when the population of the country was approximately 650 million (it is now in excess of 1.1 billion), there were a mere 8 million telephone land lines. In 2007, India set the world record by adding 8.4 million mobile phone lines in a single month. In other words, India is adding more mobile lines per month than the entire country had a mere quarter century later. Think that might change the dynamics of the society a bit?

Skilled diplomat that he is, Shashi deftly parried the inevitable “China versus India” question by answering that the felt China had won the conflict, such as it is, some thirty years prior. (He points out that China began its economic expansion long before India’s 1991 liberalization.) One observation I wasn’t expecting: Shashi relayed that India is perhaps the only country in the world with any significant Jewish population which does not have a single recorded episode of antisemitic violence. Religious tolerance and pluralism, although certainly not an absolute (think Hindu nationalism), certainly does seem more the rule than the exception in India. As Shashi points out, where else could a Roman Catholic, Italian born Indian (Sonia Ghandi) resign her mandate in favor of a preternaturally well-educated Sikh (Manmohan Singh) who would then work with a woman President (Pratibha Patil), in order that he lead a country which is 80% Hindu? We Americans, who in 225 years have not managed to elect anyone as our president who is not white, male and Christian, could perhaps learn a thing or two from the example.

Both novels come from unlikely sources: Michael Crichton, the well-known popular novelist of borderline science fiction thrillers and creator of the long-running ER, and Richard A. Clarke, the now-ostracized Clinton and Bush Administration cyberterrorism expert. Crichton’s Next is actually the second of his technology-gone-wild novels, the immediately prior one being Prey, which failed for all the reasons Next doesn’t: where Prey was really a “shoot ‘em up” movie stuffed into a novel whose plot centered around a company developing autonomous nanotechnology “bots,” Next is a collage of multiple plots–almost devoid of action–gleefully intertwining one bio-engineered protagonist with another. Next holds together better than one might expect it would without Crichton’s signature action and adventure: for all the action sequences in Jurassic Park and Sphere, Crichton is a thoughtful and well educated man (M.D. from Harvard), and Next presents the dangers of human-created interspecies gene mixes (for example, pets which have glow-in-the-dark genes from fireflies inserted in their DNA; parrots who are smarter than most five-year-old humans) clearly and convincingly.

By contrast, Richard Clarke’s Breakpoint is a narrowly-focused thriller in the classic “secret government agency v. the world” genre. Unlike Crichton, Clarke is a bit clunky when he describes his characters: he just doesn’t have Crichton’s twenty years of practice developing a light and almost comic descriptive touch. But he does a superb job of painting our countries vulnerabilities to cyber attack. The book opens with simultaneous attacks on seven of the eleven Internet fiber-optic beachheads on the US East Coast. Not one of them is protected by anything other than a fence. And in today’s just-in-time, zero inventory world, nobody has the inventory to replace the millions of dollars in equipment hidden in these utterly unguarded brick beach shacks scattered along the beaches of remote areas. Or consider the millions of SCADA sensors placed throughout the power grid system, most of which haven’t seen security upgrades in 15 years. These are just the beginnings of our vulnerabilities.

Both books are engaging, distracting, and ultimately frightening. Their intent is to wake us up to a stark reality: in the next fifteen years, bioengineering and network software will both mature as rapidly as computer technology has over the past twenty years. We’re simply not ready for the implications of those evolutions. The RIAA is still fighting its late ’90s battle with Napster–and artists like MC Lars are poking fun at them for still being so far behind. Our society simply isn’t ready for the onslaught of ethical and environmental dilemmas. We’re still focused on the battles of the past (still debating the ethics of abortion while GM crops are planted without a second thought).

Although I seriously doubt that either Crichton or Clarke will ascend to the literary pantheon the way Orwell did after 1984 (he died a year later), these two modern novelists are no less insightful. One would expect this from a man like Clarke, who spent enough years in the White House to know that fiction often carries the day over fact, but it is perhaps a bit surprising coming from Crichton, who is certainly smart, but otherwise doesn’t have a reputation as a serious thinker. Regardless of their credentials, both Crichton’s and Clarke’s books raise issues we have to confront before the technology progresses beyond our ability to cope with its ramifications.

Irshad is perhaps best known for writing the controversial
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, a work which has brought her accolades, criticism, and a fatwa. Irshad is no shrinking violet: despite her faith and profound Muslim identity, she has been the target of more criticism than I care to recount, and the fatwa certainly doesn’t make her life any easier. But no amount of criticism and no number of threats will cause her to soften her message: that Islam has forgotten its egalitarian and tolerant roots, and that Modern Islam has a lot to learn from the more open and inclusive societies.

Just under a year ago, Irshad taught a seminar as part of the Socrates Society of the Aspen Institute entitled “Reforming Islam?” and I found myself both refreshed by her willingness to confront those who disagree with her and troubled by the resistance so much of the Muslim world appears to harbor towards her and those who, like Irshad, are willing to question both their own assumptions and those of their fellow Muslims. [Note to the orthographically scrutinous: there is a QUESTION MARK--an interrogation point, an eroteme--in the title of this seminar! Irshad is asking a question (should we reform? who is we? what is reform?), not stating a position.]

The seminar centered on Irshad’s core thesis: that the concept of ijtihad must return to Islamic discourse. Ijtihad, originally a narrow Islamic legal term for making legal decisions based on interpretation of independent legal texts, has a broader meaning relating to independent and interpretation. Irshad has adopted the term and created Project Ijtihad of which she is the Chief Catalyst. Fortunately, she’s not the only one calling for independent thought and interpretation: Muqtedar Kahn’s excellent website has superb material.

This afternoon, as I drove about running errands trying to recover from the weekend’s onslaught of tryptophan, I heard Irshad’s voice on the radio. BBC World Service’s excellent Heart and Soul ran a program called “The Future Of Islam – Or Just ‘Islam Lite’?” As usual, Irshad did her cause proud. More interesting were the other Muslim thought leaders, who agreed with Irshad to one degree or another: Prof. Tariq Ramadan is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and was the subject of a number of news stories when his US Visa was revoked in 2004 when he was teaching at Notre Dame. And even Saira Khan, runner-up in the UK’s version of The Apprentice.

Irshad has her critics, and many of them could be heard throughout this thoughtful and well-balanced BBC program. One of them makes the excellent point that, even if Irshad is too far “out there” for mainstream Muslims to accept, the very nature of her “extremism” will cause others with more moderate but nevertheless reformist voices to appear less strident and less extreme in comparison. That’s something of a back-handed complement if ever I’ve heard one, but they all miss the point: what Irshad wants, what she strives for, is the very dialogue in which all of her critics are engaging.

So Irshad is Catalyzing precisely the ijtihad and the discourse she so correctly proclaims Islam needs. And, despite their dissent, even her critics have succumbed: they are engaging in intelligent debate and consideration of her ideas. And the ideas of others. And that’s precisely what ijtihad is all about. Mission accomplished.