Modern Crime: Illegal Online Arms Trade in North Africa Skyrocketing

An online marketplace for illicit weapons is thriving in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a study released today that found sales of heavy machine guns, rocket and grenade launchers, and anti-aircraft guns on private Facebook groups in Libya.

During his 40-year reign, colonel Muammar Gaddafi stockpiled an estimated $30 billion worth of weapons. At the time, the arms trade was strictly regulated and the country had limited access to the internet. (Libya is still the only country where connection speed is on average less than 1.0 Mbp.) Since his overthrow and death in 2011, those weapons have been flooding into the local marketplace, and increasingly finding their way online.

The Small Arms Survey, an independent research project that monitors arms sales, believes this trade via social media started in 2013 and is still growing. Sellers posted photos of their wares in groups like the “Libyan Firearms Market” (now taken down). Heavy machine guns went for an average of 8,125 Libyan dinar ($5,900), rocket launchers for 9,000 Libyan dinar, and an anti-aircraft system, the Russian-made ZPU-2, got offers for 85,000 Libyan dinar, or $62,000.

Most of the weapons being sold were guns, including Kalashinov rifles (around 8,000 Libyan dinars) and handguns. Sellers often did not set a price in their ad, and preferred to negotiate over the phone or in private messages, but researchers were able to document average prices.

The research group recorded 1,346 sales over the course of the last 18 months and found between 250 and 300 sales posts went up each month. The researchers believes this figure is just a fraction of the total arms trade taking place on social media in the region.

Most of the sales appeared to take place in larger Libyan cities like Tripoli and Benghazi. Sellers and buyers were mostly militia or individuals buying items for self defense. Facebook groups ranged from 400 to 14,000 members, according to theBBC, which was able to look at some of the groups before they were shut down by the social media giant.

Facebook has taken down six groups identified as arms marketplaces, according to the New York Times. Since January, the social media platform has banned individuals or companies from facilitating sales of private arms on its network.

Read the Original Article at Defense One

Examining Terrorist Tactics: The Changing Logic Behind Suicide Bombings

(Note from Hammerhead: It was just announced that yet another ISIS suicide bomber killed 29 people in a Football Stadium in Baghdad).

What was once purely a strategic action has become a tactical move meant to help hold territory.

In October 2015, two suicide bombers killed more than 100 people outside a railway station in the Turkish capital of Ankara. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s modern history, but it was also something more, something not fully appreciated at the time, according to Robert Pape, a terrorism expert at the University of Chicago: The U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State—a mixture of air strikes and support for local ground forces—had turned ISISinto a “cornered animal.” And the animal was lashing out.

The group’s suicide attacks in its sanctuaries of Syria and Iraq declined, displaced by complex acts of terrorism abroad: the Ankara attacks, followed by the October 2015 downing of a Russian plane over Egypt, the November 2015 Paris attacks,more explosions in Turkey, and most recently triple bombings, at least two of them suicide blasts, in Brussels. All have appeared meticulously designed to kill as many people as possible in countries that are all, to differing degrees, fighting the Islamic State. The question is: Why is the animal suddenly flailing about? Why are bombs going off in Brussels now?

On display in Belgium this week, Pape argues, is what he calls the “strategic logic of suicide terrorism.” Deciphering the logic of terrorists is maddeningly difficult, which is why the study of terrorism is anexercise in competing theories, all circling The Truth at varying distances.

Pape’s theory is that suicide terrorism is fundamentally a response to military intervention—in the form of a rival occupying territory that the terrorists prize. For “nationalist” reasons, the terrorists want to control that territory, as any state would, through a monopoly on force and exclusive political authority. The argument here isn’t that all territorial occupations produce suicide terrorism, or that every individual terrorist is chiefly concerned with contested land, but rather that terrorist groups that today practice suicide terrorism tend to be grappling with dynamic losses of territory. Drawing on a database of suicide attacks around the world since 1982, Pape claims that his geopolitical paradigm has more predictive power than, say, explanations for terrorism that focus on religious fanaticism.

The idea that ISIS is primarily driven by extreme Islamist ideology suggests that “the targeting logic of a group comes right from its [religious] doctrine,” Pape told me. “Given thatISIS’s doctrine has not changed—that is, it’s still a religious group—then there should never have been a shift of its targeting tactics.” And yet a shift in who it targets seems to have occurred. Why?

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ISIS Territorial Gains and Losses: January 1, 2015–March 14, 2016

IHS Conflict Monitor

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In other words: In response to Ted Cruz’s statement on Tuesday, following the bloodshed in Brussels, that “radical Islam is at war with us,” Pape might agree that ISIS is a radical Islamist group. But he likely wouldn’t agree that the precepts of radical Islam are determining the course of the war that ISISis waging.

“The ebbs and flows of territory are predictive of the group’s targeting logic,” Pape told me, and the evolution of that logic over the last six months might be the key lesson from the Brussels attacks, even if the violence may have more proximate causes as well, such as the arrest last week in Brussels of one of the plotters of the Paris attacks. “ISIS is now losing in Iraq and Syria—they’re losing actually quite badly—and so they’re now in a position where they’re trying to change a losing game,” he said. The less in control the organization is at home, the more it strikes at targets abroad.

Pape argues that interpreting incidents like the Brussels attacks as a sign of weakness rather than strength is critical. He worries that if people conclude from the Belgium bombings that ISIS is stronger than ever, they’ll be more likely to support a major American or European ground offensive against the group. Such an offensive, he believes, will greatly increase the risk of suicide terrorism against Western targets beyond what’s likely to result from the current air campaign, without offering a higher probability of success in the fight against ISIS.

In defending the link between fierce struggles for territory and the use of suicide bombing as a strategy, Pape cites historical examples ranging from Chechen terrorists in Russia to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. In 2010, he applied the theory to America’s occupations of Afghanistan starting in 2001 and Iraq starting in 2003. “From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.” The invasion of Iraq, hehas argued in the past, “produced the largest suicide campaign in history.”

But if the occupation of territory spurs terrorism, why does it take the form of suicide terrorism specifically? Suicide attacks, Pape explained, are particularly well-suited to accomplishing two goals. One is “to coerce the target government to pull back its military forces, and suicide attacks kill more people—it’s the lung cancer of terrorism—than non-suicide attacks by a factor of ten.” The public will be terrorized by the scale of the carnage and the sinister nature of the suicidal act itself, the logic goes. Under pressure, their government will be forced to retreat from the territory that the terrorists desire.

Second, in the regions where terrorist groups operate, “suicide attacks are excellent against security targets to hold territory.” Those security forces—be they American or Iraqi or Sinhalese—are usually better armed and equipped than the terrorists. “Suicide attacks are a way to level that tactical advantage,” Pape explained.

“If you’re just going to go up against a tank with a handgun, it’s a lot less effective than some coordinated suicide attacks,” he continued. “That’s why, when there was a pitched battle for [the Iraqi city of] Ramadi last May, there were complex suicide attacks [by ISIS] used in coordination with other non-suicide attacks to basically seize and hold territory against an opposing force. That’s not something that we see in El Salvador with the [guerrilla group] FMLN [during the Salvadoran Civil War]. We don’t see that with the [Viet Cong] in South Vietnam [during the Vietnam War]. They’re not holding territory in a pitched way. … Suicide attack allows for more aggressive, coercive punishment and it allows for more aggressive territorial strategies.” While these strategic considerations have remained fairly constant across time and place, he says, what’s changed in the last 10 or 15 years is that in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, suicide bombing has increasingly been used as a tactic to take and hold territory.

On Tuesday, ISIS justified its suicide attacks as retaliation against “the Crusader states” for “their aggression against the Islamic State,” adding that it had targeted “Crusader Belgium” in particular because it would “not stop targeting Islam and its people.” The statement had all the trappings of a religious message, but its essential argument echoed Pape’s secular thesis: Brussels was being targeted for the participation of Belgium, and European countries more broadly, in the anti-ISIScoalition. What if we take the jihadists at their word?

Read the Original Article at Defense One

 

“Predictive Policing”: The Cyber Version of “Stop and Frisk”

Thanks America! How China’s Newest Software Could Track, Predict, and Crush Dissent

Armed with data from spying on its citizens, Beijing could turn ‘predictive policing’ into an AI tool of repression.

What if the Communist Party could have predicted Tiananmen Square? The Chinese government is deploying a new tool to keep the population from uprising. Beijing is building software to predict instability before it arises, based on volumes of data mined from Chinese citizens about their jobs, pastimes, and habits. It’s the latest advancement of what goes by the name “predictive policing,” where data is used to deploy law enforcement or even military units to places where crime (or, say, an anti-government political protest) is likely to occur. Don’t cringe: Predictive policing was born in the United States. But China is poised to emerge as a leader in the field.

Here’s what that means.

First, some background. What is predictive policing? Back in 1994, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton led a pioneering and deeply controversial effort to pre-deploy police units to places where crime was expected to occur on the basis of crime statistics.

Bratton, working with Jack Maple, deputy police commissioner, showed that the so-called CompStat decreased crime by 37 percent in just three years. But it also fueled an unconstitutional practice called “stop-and-frisk,” wherein minority youth in the wrong place at the wrong time were frequently targeted and harassed by the police. Lesson: you can deploy police to hotspots before crime occurs but you can cause more problems than you solve.

That was in New York.

Wu Manqing, a representative from China Electronics Technology, the company that the Chinese government hired to design the predictive policing software, described the newest version as “a unified information environment,” Bloomberg reported last week. Its applications go well beyond simply sending police to a specific corner. Because Chinese authorities face far fewer privacy limits on the sorts of information that they can gather on citizens, they can target police forces much more precisely. They might be able to target an individual who suddenly received and deposited a large payment to their bank account, or who reads pro-democracy news sites, or who is displaying a change in buying habits — purchasing more expensive luxury items, for instance. The Chinese government’s control over the Internet in that country puts it in a unique position to extend the reach of surveillance and data collection into the lives of citizens. Chinese authorities plan to deploy the system in places where the relations between ethnic minorities and Chinese party are particularly strained, according to Bloomberg.

 For all the talk in Washington casting China as a rising regional military threat, the country began spending more on domestic security and stability, sometimes called wei-wen, than on building up its military in 2011. More recent numbers are harder to come by, but many China watchers believe the trend has continued.

After the Arab Spring in 2011, Chinese leaders increased internal security spending by 13 percent to 624 billion yuan, outpacing spending on the military, which was 601 billion yuan. That year, the Chinese government compelled 650 cities to improve their ability to monitor public spaces via surveillance cameras and other technologies. “Hundreds of Chinese cities are rushing to construct their safe city platforms by fusing Internet, video surveillance cameras, cell phones, GPS location data and biometric technologies into central ICT meta-systems,” reads the introduction to a 2013 report on Chinese spending on homeland security technologies from the Homeland Security Research Council, a market research firm in Washington.

China soon emerged as the world’s largest market for surveillance equipment. Western companies including Bain Capital, the equity firm founded by former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, all wanted a piece of a pie worth a potential $132 billion (in 2022.)

But collecting massive amounts of data leads inevitably to the question of how to analyze it at scale. China is fast becoming a world leader in the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for national security. Chinese scientists recently unveiled two papers at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and each points to the future of Chinese research into predictive policing.

One explains how to more easily recognize faces by compressing a Deep Neural Network, or DNN, down to a smaller size. “The expensive computation of DNNs make their deployment difficult on mobile and embedded devices,” it says. Read that to mean: here’s a mathematical formula for getting embedded cameras to recognize faces without calling up a distant database.

The second paper proposes software to predict the likelihood of a “public security event” in different Chinese provinces within the next month. Defense One was able to obtain a short demonstration of the system. Some of the “events” include the legitimately terrifying “campus attack” or “bus explosion” to the more mundane sounding, “strike event” or “gather event,” (the researchers say this was the “gather” incident in question.) all on a scale of severity from 1 to 5. To build it, the researchers relied on a dataset of more than 12,324 disruptive occurrences that took place across different provinces going back to 1998.

The research by itself is not alarming. What government doesn’t have an interest in stopping shootings or even predicting demonstrations?

It’s the Chinese government’s definition of “terrorism” that many in the West find troubling, since the government has used the phantom of public unrest to justify the arrests of peaceful dissidents, such as women’s rights worker Rebiya Kadeer.

Those fears increased after the Chinese government passed new anti-terror legislation in December that expanded government surveillance powers and that compels foreign technology companies to assist Chinese authorities in data collection efforts against Chinese citizens. Specifically, the law says that telecommunication and technology companies “shall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist activities.”

The U.S. objects, and State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the law “could lead to greater restrictions on the exercise of freedoms of expressions, association, and peaceful assembly.” The FBI’s push to compel Apple to provide a different technical interface into Syed Farook’s iPhone is one reason leaders in China are watching the FBI versus Apple debate so closely (and the epitome of irony).

“Essentially, this law could give the authorities even more tools in censoring unwelcome information and crafting their own narrative in how the ‘war on terror’ is being waged,” human rights worker William Nee told the New York Times.

It could also compel foreign technology companies to assist the Chinese government in the acquisition of more data to train predictive policing software efforts. That’s where China’s predictive policing powers enter the picture.

Predictive policing efforts are rising around the United States with programs in Memphis, Tennessee, Chicago, Illinois, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California, and elsewhere. Police departments implement them in a variety of ways, many not particularly controversial. Beijing has the resources, will, and the data and inclination to turn predictive policing into something incredibly powerful, and, possibly, quite dreadful.

Read the Original Article at Defense One

Fingerprint Spoofing: Yeah there’s An App for That

So That Thumbprint Thing on Your Phone Is Useless Now

Researchers found a cheap, easy way to copy your fingerprints a few months after millions of Americans had theirs stolen by hackers.

Last year, when the Office of Personnel Management notified 22 million people that their personal information was compromised in a massive data breach, one in four received especially nasty news. For most hack victims, the sensitive personal data that was exposed included Social Security numbers, health and financial records, names of relatives, and past addresses. But 5.6 million people learned that their fingerprints were also stolen.

At the time of the announcement, OPM downplayed the importance of the stolen fingerprints. “Federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited,” an OPMstatement read. “However, this probability could change over time as technology evolves.”

That was in September. Now, researchers have developed a cheap and easy way to print out an image of a fingerprint with enough accuracy to fool commercially available fingerprint readers—using just a standard inkjet printer.

The method, outlined in a paper published last month, is certainly not the first one to produce fake fingerprints that are able to fool readers. But where earlier methods required more time and specialized materials, this new method is replicable in just about any home office.

To create a working copy of a fingerprint, the study authors—Kai Cao and Anil Jain, both researchers at Michigan State University—started by installing special ink cartridges and paper in a Brother inkjet printer. Both materials came from a Japanese company called AgIC: The ink can conduct electricity when printed on the specialized paper, effectively creating a printed circuit. The researchers scanned a fingerprint in high resolution, mirrored it, and printed it with the retrofitted inkjet.

The researchers placed the fake, printed fingerprint on the fingerprint readers of two popular Android phones, a Samsung Galaxy S6 and a Huawei Hornor 7. Both phones were set up to unlock with the owner’s real fingerprint—but the fake version of the same finger fooled them. (Cao told Quartz that he had mixed results when using an iPhone.)

The easy fingerprint-spoofing method is particularly worrisome in the context of the OPM breach. After all, prints aren’t just useful for unlocking smartphones—they can also be used to authorize financial transactions, from small Apple Pay purchases to large bank transfers. And, of course, once a fingerprint has been compromised, there’s no resetting it the way you can change a password—short of a thumb transplant.

The simplicity and speed of the new fingerprint-spoofing method makes it easy to copy a lot of fingerprints fast, Cao told me in an email. His method is remarkable because the fake fingerprints are two-dimensional—earlier techniques required raising the ridges of a fake fingerprint with latex or wood glue.

Fingerprint-copying enthusiasts following along at home can get started for cheap. Everything you need to create a paper version of your (or someone else’s) fingerprint can be shipped to your door for less than $450.

For the millions of OPM hack victims who had their fingerprint data compromised, that’s unhappy news. Until everyday fingerprint readers advance to the point that they can discern between a human hand and a printout, they may want to start unlocking their smartphones the old-fashioned way.

Read the Original Article at Defense One

What the 2016 Presidential Candidates Get Wrong About the Future of War

They fail, they lack, they misunderstand, they pander, they don’t get, and they just don’t know national security – not according to our Future of War roster of experts.

“The President shall be Commander in Chief…”

This clause that leads Article Two, Section II of the U.S. Constitution is without a doubt the most important of the executive powers granted to the president by the Founding Fathers. But as today’s crop of presidential candidates seek that job, do they really understand the issues that await them tomorrow when it comes to the future of war?

If history is any guide, the answer is no. When George Washington took the oath of office for the first time, he didn’t expect he’d soon be leading a force of some 13,000 troops into Western Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion (the first and last time the president served as a commander in chief in the field). Abraham Lincoln, at his inauguration, expected conflict was on the way, as seven Southern states already had seceded since his election. But no one expected the Civil War would last four more years and introduce industrialized warfare. More recently, George W. Bush entered office lamenting “nation building” and would leave it presiding over two massive nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In turn, Barack Obama pledged to responsibly end America’s involvements in these wars. He will leave office not only with forces still there, but also having commanded air and drone war campaigns in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

The Future of War project is a joint effort of New America and Arizona State, in partnership with Defense One, that brings together a diverse group of experts, whose backgrounds range from Navy SEALs and scientists to historians, journalists, and lawyers. As a lead up to the project’s “Future of War” conference on Mar. 10—which you can livestream here—we asked them:

“What do the 2016 presidential candidates get most wrong about the #FutureofWar?”

Their answers covered areas that ranged from strategy to terrorism, but a theme that cut through was the need to be honest to the American people, and themselves, about what awaits. In an age of TV soundbites and Twitter trolling, let’s hope that whoever wins the upcoming election is the exception to the rule that presidential candidates just don’t get the Future of War.

Read the Remainder at Defense One