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April 06, 2010

UK MoD Defence Cultural Specialist Unit to deploy to Helmand

I was interested to see Wired reporting that

the DCSU deploys this month to southern Afghanistan, where it will serve as a dedicated cultural advisory team for Task Force Helmand. The news item says the unit is charged with “build[ing] a picture of Helmandi society for commanders in Task Force Helmand and battlegroups across the province to help them identify and understand issues relating to the local cultural, political, economic, social and historical environment to help commanders make better and more informed decisions.”

It sounds a lot like the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, with a key distinction: Most of the team members are uniformed military. According to a February MOD news article, most of the advisors will be “senior military officers.” While uniformed military are members of U.S. Human Terrain Teams, the initial focus was on recruiting social scientists and anthropologists to embed with military brigades.

This does definitely read as another aspect of how the military (both US and UK) is taking social science seriously. The emphasis on the role of military officers is interesting, though: one wonders how this will affect the practice of the Unit in Helmand and, subsequently, how the officers' training will impact their future work.

Wider impacts in the MoD seem likely:

As well as deploying to Afghanistan, the units' personnel will also support cultural training in the wider military and other government departments

Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations) Air Vice-Marshal Andy Pulford said that a focus on cultural issues is essential to success in Afghanistan. He said:

"Cultural awareness has been a weakness in the past. The unit is essential to equipping the military with a better understanding and appreciation of the region, its people and how to do business there."

There is clearly an emphasis on social sciences here: the MoD reports that

the cultural specialist level two course which is specialist training at a masters level, covering anthropology, psychology, sociology and influencing skills, lasting around ten weeks.

Sharing his experience of Afghan culture with his British colleagues at this week's brigade headquarters course was Major Mohammed Safi from the Afghan National Army.

He explained why he thought the need for cultural understanding is so essential:

"The enemy and insurgents exploit the lack of cultural understanding to win over the local population and entire villages who feel they have been shamed or dishonoured by actions taken by foreign troops.

"The insurgents exploit grievances from villagers about issues such as searches, lack of respect, shaming of women, and use this as a major recruiting argument amongst people who, fundamentally, oppose them.

"This is really important for the soldiers. International forces have to know about the culture and understand which areas to respect; how to enter a house, how to search people.

"The soldiers who go to Afghanistan need to know what they can and can't do."

There are calls to embed social sciences much more widely, too:

Commander John Garratt RN, a team leader within the unit, explained how the MOD has long recognised the need for cultural training:

"Every soldier, sailor and airman currently deploying to Afghanistan already undertakes a period of pre-deployment training [PDT] that includes some 'dos and don'ts' of cultural training.

"PDT helps us all to avoid doing things that are seen as 'negative' in the eyes of Afghans. There remains however a need for greater emphasis to influence the hearts and minds of everyone, from the youngest child, up to the most influential leader."

He went on to state that he sees a time in the near future when all soldiers, sailors and airmen will be given exposure to cultural training far earlier in their careers.

It will definitely be interesting to see how these uses of - and expansions of the role of - social science play out.

Posted by jon_mendel at 07:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 02, 2010

GCHQ: BBC fails to crack the code

Earlier this week, the BBC broadcast a programme on the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ): a UK intelligence agency. Security correspondent Gordon Corera was, very unusually, allowed some access. However, the programme was extremely disappointing: strikingly uncritical and un-probing. A few aspects of the show particularly stand out, and I will discuss them below.

Most problematically, Corera gives Iain Lobban (GCHQ's director) the opportunity to discuss what Corera calls “speculation about things called Echelon and some systems for being able to listen to all kinds of private communications”. Lobban is allowed to assert unchallenged that “it’s simply not like that”. However, there is some convincing evidence regarding the Echelon system. For example, a 2001 European Parliament report [PDF, p. 133] concludes

That a global system for intercepting communications exists, operating by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt. It may be assumed, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that the system or parts of it were, at least for some time, code-named ECHELON. What is important is that its purpose is to intercept private and commercial communications, and not military communications. Analysis has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed.

It is a real shame that Corera did not push Lobban on this point. It would be fascinating to know what exactly GCHQ is claiming: are they arguing that no such system ever existed? That no such system exists now? Or, simply, that there is no longer a system which is codenamed Echelon?

Also interesting is that Joanna, a GCHQ mathematician, states that a brute force attack on encrypted files would take 50-100 years to crack the encryption. This is surprising: with 256-bit AES encryption (easy to implement on a home computer) it would take massively longer than 100 years for an implausibly large and powerful computer to crack the key through a brute force attack (PGP's CTO offers an interesting discussion of some of the issues here). The 50-100 year statement is therefore interesting, and there are a number of possible reasons for it:
- Joanna may have been outright mistaken. Possible, but seems unlikely - mathematicians tend to be rather precise, and good with numbers.
- GCHQ may have invented some kind of secret ultra-computer which goes far, far beyond what is currently thought to be possible. However, it is hard to conceive how such a thing might work (at least, way beyond my technical ability) and, if it had been invented, one would expect GCHQ to have avoided dropping any hints on a BBC programme!
- GCHQ's targets tend to use lower levels of encryption. This is possible, and seems most likely (though it's quite possible I'm missing something). Encryption which takes 'just' 50 years to brute force would generally be quite good enough for terrorist groups.
Sadly, Corera didn't seem to follow up on this - so we don't have any more information regarding why this odd timescale was mentioned.

Surprisingly, Dave (on GCHQ's Information Assurance team) claims not to employ “so-called bad people, the hackers. We don't employ hackers”. I would be rather concerned if the UK government did not make use of 'white hat' hackers in order to test their security, and it would be surprising if an agency like GCHQ did not employ any hackers (there can be lots of grey areas here - but hackers certainly aren't all bad people!) Again, Corera failed to challenge this claim.

A local news story about the programme focuses on what it revealed about the dress code of mathematicians. While the programme could have been really interesting - had it taken a more investigative approach - I suspect, sadly, that what was broadcast does not reveal much beyond some anecdotes about mathematicians wearing socks and sandals. A major missed opportunity.

Posted by jon_mendel at 06:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack