During the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer, my friend Evgeny Morozov decided to study the dynamics of “cyberwar” by becoming a partisan. He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate in distributed denial of service attacks against Georgian websites. Some were simple webpages with a few lines of javascript designed, essentially, to press the reload button over and over. Others were slightly more sophisticated, written as .BAT files, but essentially using the same methodology. (Morozov, to be clear, isn’t especially sympathetic to the Russian cause, and it’s unlikely that his brief stint as cyberpartisan did any significant damage.)

It’s becoming increasingly common for realworld conflict to include a digital dimension, typically attacks designed to disable websites that promote the other side’s cause. In an article last summer, I questioned whether this form of activity really deserved to be called “cyberwar” as it’s not an attack on their forces or infrastructures, more analagous to graffiti than grenades. I got a lot of feedback on that story, including observations from some in the security community that there appeared to be two levels of hacking going on: the “kid’s stuff” that Morozov documented and larger attacks that some felt bore the fingerprints of commercial hacking groups like the Russian Business Network.

Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising to see hackers working in support of Israel and Palestine during the current Gaza conflict. Zone-H.org, a site that tracks website defacement and other forms of hacking, offers some interesting screenshots of US military sites defaced by Turkish hackers in support of Gazans. But what’s got cyberwar geeks buzzing is the “help-israel-win” project put together by a group of Israeli students and hackers.

The group’s website – which is moving around as pro-Palestinian hackers flood it with DDOS attacks – invites partisans to download an .exe file, install it on their computers and start it from a link on their desktop. The website – with instructions available in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian – doesn’t make it very clear what the tool does: “We created a project that unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel. The more support we get, the efficient we are!” In response to apparent user concerns, it includes the reassurances, “The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind – anonymity guaranteed!”

Bojan Zdrnja of the Internet Storm Center has been analyzing the program and offers some good technical reasons (aside from whatever political reasons you might or might not have) to install the software. The code is obfuscated to make it harder to analyze, but he was able to determine that the program connects to one of thirteen IRC servers, where it waits for instructions for a target to attack. This is the working method used by botnets, collections of computers compromised by trojan horse software so that the botnet controller can unleash massive denial of service attacks. These attacks are usually a form of extortion – this excellent piece by Evan Ratliffe helps explain some of the economics behind the attacks and the measures some are taking to fend them off.

It appears that the “help-israel-win” folks are asking partisans to voluntarily join a botnet, which could be pointed at pro-Palestinian websites. In his analysis of the software, Zdrnja saw no evidence that the botnet was actually attacking anything – his client connected to an IRC room and waited for instructions, indefinitely. He worries, though, that the client has the ability to update itself and might currently be in a dormant state. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine an update that makes the software uninstallable, allowing the machine to be used as part of a botnet aimed at an arbitrary target.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge technical development. By some estimates 1/4 of all Windows PCs are part of one or more botnets, and this new botnet would be quite modest in comparison to the commercial botnets discovered by police and system administrators. What’s interesting is the way in which citizen propaganda and hacking are coming together.

Pro-Israel netizens already have robust tools to allow them to support Israel’s political communication strategy. Give Israel Your United Support offers a downloadable tool that identifies online stories, surveys and other places where pro-Israel comments and votes can be left online. The tool urges partisans to respond to each of these stories – as anyone who’s run a media organization that reports on Israel and Palestine, stories on the conflict routinely generate 5-50x the traffic of other stories, in part due to efforts like GIYUS.

I suspect it’s a small step, conceptually, from downloading a tool that prompts you to post comments to one that controls your computer as part of a DDOS attack. There are, of course, a couple of critical differences. Join “help-israel-win” and you’re breaking the law in most jurisdictions. And you’re giving a group of Israeli hackers unprecedented access to your computer, including the ability to install software which would let them index your hard drive or attack random targets across the web. (Wouldn’t it be ironic if RBN or others had started a project based on nationalist sentiment designed to open back doors in computers to compromise them for commercial purposes?)

I’ll be very interested to see whether this idea takes off, either growing a robust botnet around this project or being adopted by other “cyberwarriors”. Whoever’s using these tools, this looks a lot like the dark side of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group forming”. It’s one thing to form groups to debate and counter opinion online – forming groups to shut down websites looks a lot like gang thuggery to me.

Thanks to Ron Deibert for pointing me to the Wired article on the “help-israel-win” project.

It’s cold in much of Europe this week, and it feels even colder when you can’t turn on the heat. From Turkey to France, people are finding themselves sitting in the cold due to a dispute between Ukraine and Russia over natural gas. The dispute is complicated, and involves the price Ukraine’s company Naftohaz pays Russia’s Gazprom for natural gas, the money Naftohaz is paid for gas transiting to Europe through its pipeline, the money Ukraine owes Russia and broader political issues between the two countries. In the past few days, Russia has accused Ukraine of stealing gas intended for European markets from the pipeline. On January 7th – the same day Marseilles saw heavy snow – Gazprom cut off gas to Ukraine, and to millions of customers in Europe whose gas transits through Ukraine. Some countries in eastern Europe are entirely dependent on Russia for gas, and others in Central Europe import more than 80% of their gas from Russia, so a gas shut off is a very big deal for a lot of people.

Map of affected pipelines in Europe, from Petroleum Economist magazine.

Most of us don’t think about the global infrastructure that makes our connected world work so smoothly until something fails. When it does, we reach for maps. Undersea cables snapped, meaning there’s very little connectivity to the Middle East? Better call Telegeography, a firm that studies global communications infrastructure and builds beautiful maps of undersea cables. The go-to guys for maps of gas pipelines appear to be the folks at Petroleum Economist magazine – the BBC is running a pair of maps from the magazine showing the affected pipelines and the wider grid of existing and proposed pipelines in the region.

(These maps aren’t cheap, by the way. A map series from Petroleum Economist of pipelines and oil facilities in a region costs more than $1000 USD. Telegeography’s products are similarly dear, which is more or less the only reason why I don’t have a version of their internet map hanging in my office.)

These maps gain so much attention, I think, because the failure of our infrastructure is an uncomfortable reminder of how dependent we all are on systems we generally know little about and usually don’t understand very well. The average Bulgarian doesn’t often need to think about where natural gas comes from – it comes from the gas company, up until the moment it doesn’t. It’s only when the car doesn’t work that we consult the Chilton guide; only when the gas, the bits or power isn’t flowing that we look at maps of the infrastructure we rely on for these international flows.

I’m starting to think that our understanding of globalized infrastructure is a bit like understanding of the human brain before MRIs and PET scans. Much of our early understanding of the brain came from studying patients who had suffered catastrophic brain injury and survived. A blasting accident that drove a heavy iron rod through the skull of railroad foreman Phineas Gage was a boon to physicians and scientists, as Gage survived but exhibited a personality change. The catastrophic event let scientists conclude that the front of the brain wasn’t neccesary for language or motor control, as Gage could speak and move, but might affect his reasoning and judgement, as Gage was impulsive and confrontational after the injury. (He might just have been really pissed off about the large iron rod in his head.)

Similarly, the collapse of AIG means that the average investor understands the role of credit default swaps in the infrastructure of the global financial system much better than before the fiscal catastrophe. A detailed overview of derivatives would have included some discussion of CDSs before AIG… but it took a thorough collapse for most people to understand how important and dangerous these instruments can be. Between 1997 and 2007, the New York Times mentioned “credit default swaps” 21 times in their pages; in the past year, 167 stories have mentioned the instruments. Sometimes a catastrophic failure tells us what features to emphasize in a map.

Given the interest in these sorts of maps, I’m surprised there are few atlases focused on globalization. A new atlas from Le Monde Diplomatique appears to address some aspects of globalization, notably economic inequality, but isn’t focused on the infrastructures of a connected world that fascinate me. My dream atlas would document the infrastructures of a connected world – the gas pipelines, telecommunication cables, airline and container shipping routes and power grids. But we’d need maps of flow as well – who pumps gas to whom, and how much? How does power move through the grid over the course of a day or a year? An atlas of globalization would map more than the infrastructure of our connected world – it would map the ways in which we connect and disconnect, and help get us closer to intuiting the ways we want to connect and disconnect.

This would not be an easy atlas to compile. The folks at Telegeography aren’t ruthless monopolists – it’s really hard work to obtain information about all the world’s cables, especially when companies want to keep competitive information secret. More demand for this information would likely bring the cost down… but might introduce new risks. It’s easy to understand why groups like the Department of Homeland Security would be concerned about having easily accessible maps of power grids, oil refineries, sewer systems. (Can anyone remind me – I seem to remember a PhD student who was prevented from publishing a dissertation that included complex maps of infrastructure in a US city. Does this ring bells for anyone?) As I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, mapping flow can be even more fraught, as these maps require – on one level or another – surveillance.

Without these maps, though, understanding a connected world can be more about guesswork and intuition than scientific study. Having widely studied maps of infrastructure and flow – even if they initially make our connected world more vulnerable – would likely increase our security in the long run, forcing us to examine vulnerabilities and protect weak points, rather than relying on security through obscurity. In their absence, I would expect that the next time we pay close attention to globalized infrastructure is our next Phineas Gage event – the next misfortune that calls attention to the complex systems we otherwise succeed in ignoring.

(Many thanks to Eszter Hargittai for her feedback on ideas about mapping infrastructure, flow and intention, and for prompting me to think about the gas shutoff in this context.)

Update:
Gorgeous example of a flow map from Rocky Mountain Institute, portraying oil imports into the US from 1973 to the present.

• OSI Forum: New Media in Authoritarian Societies
  Forum at Open Society Institute in NYC on new media in closed societies featuring John Kelley, Evgeny Morozov, myself and others.
  (tags: iran russia china socialmedia newmedia freespeech mine)
• interactions magazine
  Lovely piece on the need for local product design, focusing on a couple of notable case studies, like a Whirlpool washing machine that sold poorly in India as it had a disturbing tendency to shred saris. Some useful background on the rise of emerging markets and the challenges of selling to an extremely diverse range of "emerging market" consumers
  (tags: design business culture globalization india usability anthropology cultural xenophilia)
• Refocusing on our mission | One Laptop per Child
  OLPC lays off half its staff, announces a refocus on "no-cost connectivity", digital books and developing the next edition of hardware. Sounds like a bad omen for anyone doing tech nonprofits in this environment, and raises some questions about who's going to take on the really hard parts of OLPC – desiging educational uses, distributing and supporting laptops on the ground.
  (tags: olpc nonprofit finance ict4d education)
• Can Partisanship Save Citizenship? | The American Prospect
  Excellent piece from Henry Farrell arguing that the rise of netroots around Obama suggests that we may be seeing a more involved citizenry, but that involvement may be around partisan lines, not the cross-partisan organizations Robert Putnam and others have hoped for.
  (tags: activism blogging politics obama sociology democracy participation partisanship echochambers farrell)

I’m not going to brave DC for Obama’s inauguration in a couple of weeks, as much as I’m thrilled about his victory, I’m not too sad about missing a a city packed to the gills, balls that I can’t get into and thousands of people lined up on the national mall.

Ghana’s inauguration, on the other hand, looks like it was a really good time.

The video above, shot by Amos Anyimadu of AfricaTalks at Accra’s Black Star Square, gives a sense for the excitement, craziness and scale of the event. But a single, brief tweet today from ghanaelections: “Nana Akufo-Addo arrives the Independence Square for the swearing in ceremony, amid cheers from Ghanaians”

Calling Ghana’s election close is an understatement – the final margin was less than 41,000 votes out of more than 9 million cast, or less than half a percent of total ballots. It wasn’t an easy election to conduct, with two rounds of voting and a revote in an area where a round of ballots never reached the polling place. There were cases of intimidation and scuffles at polling places, and both parties had difficulties placing observers at polls in the opponent’s strongholds. As the process dragged on, the situation got quite tense, with both sides threatening to contest results in court and take to the streets.

It’s less than a week from the revote in Tain, and as thousands of NDC supporters gathered in Accra to celebrate their victory at the inauguration, they cheered for the opposition candidate as he entered the Square. Akufo-Addo could have challenged election results in court, refused to accept the outcome, or simply stayed home. He came, his opponents cheered him, and Ghana moves forwards.

Needless to say, anyone who cares about Ghana – or Africa as a whole – has been celebrating this past week, whether or not they supported Atta Mills. Sokari Ekine notes, “Ghana has held a ‘free, fair and transparent election in which an opposition candidate defeated a candidate of the ruling party’ and for this we should all celebrate and hopefully people from elsewhere on the continent will take notice of what is possible.” Comparing Ghana and Nigeria in terms of educational systems and crime, Oz notes, “Ghana is quickly becoming the first sustained example of what a large African state ought to look like.” And media outlets that usually don’t cover Africa too closely are taking notice. Matthew Green of The Financial Times seems to understand just how critical the election was and how good we feel about the outcome: “At a time when scenes of violence and intimidation have played prominently in the imagery surrounding polling in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe, the scenario navigated by Ghana could have tipped less stable peers into turmoil.”

Green’s story notes that the election helps cement Ghana as an African success story. I’d add that Ghana’s increasingly becoming an example for aspiring democracies on the continent. Ghana’s success in overcoming ethnic divisions, empowering women (the incoming speaker of Parliament, Justice Joyce Bamford-Addo was sworn in by Chief Justice Georgina Wood in today’s ceremony), creating a healthy environment for business and trade and maintaining economic and political stability is powerful encouragement to other nations wrestling with similar challenges.

If Atta Mills wants Ghana to be a more impressive example, here are a couple of things he and his administration need to get right:

- Oil. Ghana’s got it, and starting in 2010, Ghana will be a producer of a modest, but significant amount of oil. Very few governments handle oil well, and the wealth associated with the resource is a major temptation towards corruption. Despite well-intentioned efforts from the World Bank, Chad managed to use new-found oil wealth to build military might rather than schools and hospital. Embarassed, the World Bank quietly pulled out. Ghana needs to do much better, and Ghana’s wisely looking to Norway for advice.

- Corruption. Government corruption in Ghana isn’t as widespread as in many of her neighbors, but it’s a real problem, one that hurts poor people and harms economic growth. Atta Mills campaigned on a promise to address government corruption… but so does every opposition candidate. A crackdown on corruption will be more convincing if it affects members of both major political parties, not just entrenched NPP supporters.

- Inequality. As Ghana’s economy improves, we’re seeing the emergence of a middle class and a small number of very wealthy people. That’s not a bad thing – inequality happens in healthy economies. But Ghanaians who aren’t seeing their lives improve are getting – understandably – pissed off. Mills needs to improve the educational system, build infrastructure (especially roads, rail and other facilities for improved trade) and encourage businesses (international and run by diasporans) to invest in projects in Ghana that create jobs not just for the wealthiest and best educated.

- International leadership. African leaders tend to be too respectful of one another, unwilling to condemn rigged elections, political violence and repression of dissent. With a double alternation of power in Ghana’s immediate past, Mills can speak to governance issues on the continent with a great deal of weight, authority and influence.

There’s a tendency for bad news to travel much faster than good. In an African context, it sometimes seems like the good news never reaches audiences at all. The good news around Ghana’s election is something very much worth celebrating, and I hope it gets celebrated far and wide.

• Global Development: Views from the Center: My (Partial) Policy Wish List for 2009: Development Dreaming or Practical Possibilities?
  Nancy Birdsall's wishlist for development priorities in an Obama administration. Not a bad start… how about some pressure on farm subsidies?
  (tags: development trade migration usaid uspolitics obama economics)
• EXILED ONLINE – MANKIND%u2019S ONLY ALTERNATIVE The War Nerd: Hamas Ain%u2019t No Hezbollah – By Gary Brecher
  A blunt, stark, lucid analysis of the current conflict in Gaza and the likely outcomes.
  (tags: israel gaza palestine war)

Nora Young, host of CBC’s radio program Spark, was kind enough to interview me on some of my favorite topics – xenophilia and cultural bridging, mostly – a couple of weeks back. That interview is airing in two parts, this week and next, and is accompanied by some other cool stories, including Mitch Kapor on a CTO for the US, and speculations on what would happen if gamers ran the world. Should be a good show – hope you’ll give it a listen.

Folks who study internet filtering found their phones ringing yesterday as reporters sought comment on the news that Chinese internet authorities were warning a number of major websites to clean up “large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths.” The sites listed by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center included Google’s web page and image searches as well as several major Chinese internet portals.

The questions I got focused on whether a crackdown on pornography was likely to be a smokescreen for restrictions on other types of speech. Rebecca MacKinnon – who is far better qualified to answer these questions than I am – agrees that technology used to restrict the internet in China is almost always used to restrict political speech. But she notes that this is hardly the first crackdown: “Chinese domestic websites hosting blogs, chatrooms, and other user-generated content never let up on political censorship. It’s just that foreigners only seem to notice what happens to foreign websites…”

In talking to reporters, I tried to make the point that a crackdown on pornographic material might backfire in an interesting way. Research at Berkman that Hal Roberts and I have conducted suggests that there’s only a small percentage of Chinese internet users looking for ways to evade the Great Firewall using tools like proxy servers. There are, I suspect, lots, lots more users who are interested in accessing pornography. Should China make a strong effort at blocking pornographic content, we’d likely see many, many more users learning how to use proxies to evade censorship.

I’ve observed in the past that when governments overblock, preventing people from accessing innocuous content in the hopes of keeping them from controversial content, they actually call more attention to the controversial content. (See my blogpost on the Cute Cat Theory for far more on this idea.) If China blocks pornography effectively, they will inadvertently create a new generation of webusers experienced with evading filters. They may not even notice until local or national events inspire people to write and organize online. If this is a way of hiding a crackdown on speech, it’s a really foolish way for authorities to do so – censoring content that lots of people want to access is a surefire way to generate increased resistance to censorship.

• Web Ink Now: The US Air Force: Armed with social media
  The US Air Force is using social media to recruit, promote and counter what it sees as misinformation. A model they're offering to govern their participation on blogs, twitter, etc. is surprisingly smart, with an emphasis on transparency and respectful dialog. Will be fascinating to see how this actually plays out.
  (tags: blogs media web2.0 socialmedia twitter communications airforce USAF propoganda)
• BBC NEWS | World | Africa | UN chief commends Ghana on vote
  BBC notes that while Ghana is gaining plaudits for the election, it looks as if NPP may still challenge results in court.
  (tags: africa ghana elections)
• Opposition Leader Is Declared the Winner of Ghana%u2019s Presidential Election – NYTimes.com
  NYTimes sees a successful, careful transfer of power in Ghana and notes the contrast to other elections on the continent
  (tags: ghana africa elections politics)
• Iceland Created a Vast Bubble, Leaving Wreckage Everywhere When It Popped – WSJ.com
  Authoritative analysis of the collapse of the Icelandic banking system, including some implications for UK investors and charities.
  (tags: economics globalization business finance currency iceland capitalism)
• Al Jazeera English – War on Gaza – In the US, Gaza is a different war
  Excellent oped that focuses on media bias both in US and Arab media regarding the bombings of Gaza. Argues – persuasively, IMHO – that US media suffers from the tendency to equate both sides in a conflict, which in this case can look like siding with Israel, and demonstrates the challenges of an always on, one-story media environment in the Arab world.
  (tags: media bias US USpolitics israel palestine aljazeera)
• Denford Magora's Zimbabwe Blog Latest Zimbabwe News, latest Zimbabwe Pictures Daily, Comment and Analysis
  Denford Magora's insightful, provocative blog on Zimbabwean politics
  (tags: africa zimbabwe politics freespeech)
• Writing the Web's future in numerous languages – International Herald Tribune
  Nice overview of some of the technical challenges surrounding multilingualism online, with a focus on India. Features Quillpad, an intriguing transliteration tool to make it easier to write in Kannada by typing roman equivalents.
  (tags: internet india language innovation international web translation google localization transliteration polyglot)

As 2008 rolled in, friends around the world were watching the events in Kenya with increasing panic as a disputed election turned into increasingly violent protests, eventually killing over a thousand and displacing hundreds of thousands.

This year, we’re watching elections in Ghana unfold, but there’s surprisingly little panic desite an absurdly close election. In the first round of presidential elections, Nana Akufo-Addo of the ruling NPP held a narrow lead over John Atta Mills of the opposition NDC. (It’s hard for me to call NDC the “opposition”, since I remember almost twenty years of NDC political dominance resulting from a coup.) Neither party gained a majority, so there was a runoff election on the 28th. That election proved even closer, and after 229 of 230 had their votes tallied, the margin was 50.13 – 49.87% in favor of Mills and the NDC.

The constituency that wasn’t counted is Tain, in the Brong-Ahafo region, a largely rural area which had a misvote during the runoff. Insufficient ballot papers were available – some argue that papers were stolen – and the electoral commission decided to hold a revote tomorrow. Because the margin is so small, it’s possible that Tain could swing the election, though it’s unlikely – Tain went for Mills in the first round, and unless there’s a major swing in political will, it looks like Mills and the NDC will win the election and there will be another transfer of power (the legendary “double alternation” of a mature democracy). In the meantime, both parties are relentlessly campaigning in Tain… to the shegrin of Peace Corps volunteer Grant Dobbe who’s twittering from the region and notes “i don’t know what’s worse: an endless string of xmas tunes or an endless string of NPP/NDC campaign tunes…”

It would be wrong to characterize Ghana as calm during this period – people tell me that the situation is quite tense. I’ve been getting texts and phonecalls from friends in Accra telling me that the problems are largely “big men saying stupid things” – i.e., politicians on both sides making accusations of voter fraud. (NPP believes there was fraud in the Volta region, the traditional stronghold of the NDC; NDC argues that there was fraud in the Ashanti region, the stronghold of the NPP.) But this isn’t a story about stolen elections or widespread fraud – it’s about a closely contested election that all observers see as free and fair, while admitting that there have been irregularities. The current dispute is more analagous to vote recounts in Florida or Minnesota than electoral fraud in Zimbabwe or Nigeria.

My favorite bit of evidence that Ghana’s continuing to show the continent and the world how to hold a democratic election: protesters from the ruling NPP were chased off from the Electoral Commission with water cannon. Obviously we’d all be happier if folks weren’t marching with machetes, but the government turning water cannons on its own supporters to quell a possibly violent protest strikes me as a positive sign.

Tain votes tomorrow, and we’ll likely see NDC take power. My guess is that we’ll see court challenges and ongoing dispute, but that the situation will be resolved peacefully. Or as a friend emailing me this morning put it, “Ghana has won”.