Entries Tagged "videos"

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The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency

This is interesting:

Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to “capture” the federal government—to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn’t—and doesn’t—look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete—and therefore more useful—definition of the term.

The link to his talk is broken, unfortunately.

EDITED TO ADD (12/15): Video here. Thanks, mcb.

Posted on December 15, 2009 at 7:57 AM • View Comments

The Psychology of Being Scammed

This is a very interesting paper: “Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security,” by Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson. Paul Wilson produces and stars in the British television show The Real Hustle, which does hidden camera demonstrations of con games. (There’s no DVD of the show available, but there are bits of it on YouTube.) Frank Stajano is at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.

The paper describes a dozen different con scenarios—entertaining in itself—and then lists and explains six general psychological principles that con artists use:

1. The distraction principle. While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can do anything to you and you won’t notice.

2. The social compliance principle. Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want.

3. The herd principle. Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they’re all conspiring against you.

4. The dishonesty principle. Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realize you’ve been had.

5. The deception principle. Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are.

6. The need and greed principle. Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know what you really want, they can easily manipulate you.

It all makes for very good reading.

Two previous posts on the psychology of conning and being conned.

EDITED TO ADD (12/12): Some of the episodes of The Real Hustle are available on the BBC site, but only to people with UK IP addresses—or people with a VPN tunnel to the UK.

Posted on November 30, 2009 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

TSA Successfully Defends Itself

Story here. Basically, a woman posts a horrible story of how she was mistreated by the TSA, and the TSA responds by releasing the video showing that she was lying.

There was a similar story in 2007. Then, I wrote:

Why is it that we all—myself included—believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power?

It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states. It’s not what we expect out of 21st century America.

The problem is larger than the TSA, but the TSA is the part of “homeland security” that the public comes into contact with most often—at least the part of the public that writes about these things most. They’re the public face of the problem, so of course they’re going to get the lion’s share of the finger pointing.

It was smart public relations on the TSA’s part to get the video of the incident on the Internet quickly, but it would be even smarter for the government to restore basic constitutional liberties to our nation’s counterterrorism policy. Accountability and transparency are basic building blocks of any democracy; and the more we lose sight of them, the more we lose our way as a nation.

EDITED TO ADD (11/12): Follow up by the woman who posted the original story. She claims that the TSA’s video is incomplete, and omits the part where she is separated from her son. I don’t believe her.

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 1:11 PM • View Comments

The Global Illicit Economy

Interesting video:

A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just an economic but a political force. As globalization hollows out traditional nation-states, what will fill the power vacuum in slums and hinterlands will be informal non-state governance structures. These zones will be globally connected, effectively run by local gangs, religious leaders, or quasi-tribal organizations—organizations that will govern without aspiring to statehood.

Malware is one of Nils Gilman’s examples, at about the nine-minute mark.

The seven rules of the illicit global economy (he seems to use “illicit” and “deviant” interchangeably in the talk):

  1. Perfectly legitimate forms of demand can produce perfectly deviant forms of supply.
  2. Uneven global regulatory structures create arbitrage opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs.
  3. Pathways for legitimate globalization are always also pathways for deviant globalization.
  4. Once a deviant industry professionalizes, crackdowns merely promote innovation.
  5. States themselves undermine the distinction between legitimate and deviant economics.
  6. Unchecked, deviant entrepreneurs will overtake the legitimate economy.
  7. Deviant globalization presents an existential challenge to state legitimacy.

Posted on September 8, 2009 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.