John Robb's Blog, page 7

Hacking the US with only a Sound

What happens when a terrorist network (ISIS) finds a way to activate terrorists using social media (neatly piercing the security defenses that we pay hundreds of billions of $$ for every year) to randomly attack civilians (like the  knife attack in Roanoke VA last week)?  

You get a society at a tipping point.  A society at this tipping point is reactive and labile. It is EASILY sent into a frenzied retreat.  

How is this different? 

Unlike the classic example of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater, this panic can be induced by anything that sounds/looks/feels like a threat rather than the claim of a specific threat (like "fire").  Nearly anything can set them off.

Here's three examples of that over the last two weeks (there have been many more):

JFK Airport.  Unfounded reports of gunfire led to an evacuation of terminals.  Police march passengers out of the terminal with their hands up.  Police speculate that it was started by load fans of the Rio Olympics.
CrabTree Valley Mall (NC):  Unfounded reports of an active shooter leads to a panicked evacuation of the mall.
LAX Airport.  Unfounded reports of a shooter led to people storming the jetway doors and spilling out onto the tarmac, people barricading themselves into bathrooms in multiple terminals, and more.

This public reactiveness may become the new normal both here and in Europe.  If so, we can expect people take advantage of it.  

Here's how.  

All it takes is a single audio clip.  Like this or this either near a public space or done remotely on a timed playback device is all it would take to ignite the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that leads to a large scale evacuation.  In fact, people are so reactive now, I suspect it wouldn't even take a sound that is explicit, only something that sounds similar.

Think about this for a moment.  The ability to shut down a public space for hours:

anytime (just walk in and play the sounds),
remotely (low cost playback device on timer/remote activation), or
on a large scale (thousands of people playing the sounds on their smart phones in public spaces simultaneously)

is a substantial capability.  

How so? Take this fall's election for example.   

It is a far easier to close a voting location with a sound than hack a voting machine.

 

 

Cognitive Dominance

I'll get some down and dirty insurgent thinking up tomorrow.  

In the meantime, here's some of my thinking on a strategic concept that could direct the development of autonomous robotics.  It's called cognitive dominance.  

Cognitive dominance is the ability to make more and better decisions than the competition through the use of autonomous robotics.  This scenario, written in pentagon speak, applies some of the ideas I outlined earlier.   

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The war started when a peer competitor’s African client state invaded a weaker neighbor.  The peer competitor had been investing heavily in this client state over the last decade in order to gain exclusive access to a massive tract of increasingly rare, arable land.  To expand this precious resource, the client state (with the peer competitor’s backing) invaded a neighboring country to seize its arable acreage.  This aggression created a massive humanitarian crisis, sending tens of millions of refugees north towards the safety of the European Union.  The global response to this aggression was immediate and clear, but the demands to withdraw went unheeded.  

To overcome this impasse, the US issued a stern call to the client state to withdraw and to back it up, US military forces were sent to to the region.  This move prompted the peer competitor to decry US intervention in the “internal affairs” of Africa and that US forces would not be permitted within 1,000 nautical miles of the affected region.  To back this declaration up, the peer activated a massive A2/AD defense system it had been building in the client state over the last decade.   With this move, the situation became a direct threat to US and global security.  Simply, if this provocation was allowed to stand, Africa and much of the rest of the world would be quickly divided into areas of control, defined by the effective range of A2/AD systems.  To prevent this outcome, a combined US led Joint Task Force was assembled to remove the peer competitor’s A2/AD system from the region and force the client state to return to it’s pre-war borders.  

This was the first major war since rapid advances in RAS inspired a revolution in military affairs transformed the US military.  The fruits of this transformation were seen in the first days of the war when the Joint Force opened up its first front in the war with RAS platforms and weapons systems already inside inside the opponent’s territory and formations.  In fact, much of this mix of cyber and robotic weapon systems had already penetrated the opponent years ago.  These cyber side weapons had been built to slowly traverse the Internet on their own looking for target systems to disable when hostilities began.  On the robotic side, there were long term underwater vehicles screwed in the sandy muck of the client state’s harbor, a critical pathway for the peer competitors long supply chain.  Other robotic weapons systems were entrenched in the landscape in and around the peer’s installations.

These prepositioned systems had been gathering detailed information on the peer country’s order of battle in the client state for many years.  In fact, some of these prepositioned systems were cognitively adept enough to actively retrieve [and analyze on the spot] the detailed information most needed by the Joint Force Commander.  This information provided a critical part of the “big data” in the Joint Cloud that Joint Force autonomous systems used to construct detailed physical, organizational, and systemic models of the opponent.  These models made it possible for the Joint Task Force commander to run the millions of simulated engagements needed to develop successful methods of attack and uncover the nasty surprises that could put the mission in jeopardy.  

Based on this earlier work, the first major assault of the war was designed to stress the peer’s A2/AD system in order to gather intelligence on its operation, deplete its resources, and [if possible] reinforce the Joint Force’s prepositioned forces with new capabilities.  The assault was composed of RAS swarms of smart air, land and sea platforms set to a high degree of variable autonomy.  Given the risk of the mission, the human teams teamed with the swarms were stationed beyond the edge of the battle area.  The RAS swarms were trained to deceive, jam, and confuse the active sensor network, on land and in space, the opposition’s defense systems relied upon for strike guidance.  This worked.  The defense system was lit up like a Christmas tree and fired multiple salvos of hypersonic missiles at the Joint Force assault.  However, when these missiles reentered, they were unable to find the ships and aircraft they were expected to destroy.  The second wave sent by the defense system was composed of thousands of low cost RAS platforms packed to the brim with lightning fast PGMs.  The RAS platforms, manufactured in large volume over the last two decades, were expected to close on targets and overwhelm them with superior mass.

As these forces closed, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a fair fight.  The Joint Force personnel at the edge of the effective battlespace were not surprised to see that the cloud-based training system they used to train their RAS swarms up until the last few days had successfully exploited the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the peer’s A2/AD system.  These swarms were able to systematically confuse, jam, outmaneuver, evade, and destroy the much more numerous RAS platforms of the opponent due to the far superior situational awareness, adaptability, and training of the traditionally developed systems deployed against them.  The swarms that did make it through did run into a surprise when the anti-air mobile laser used RAS based cognitive capabilities to knock out a dozen Joint Force drones before it was taken out of action.  Fortunately, the peer’s employment of RAS platforms that were cognitively dangerous, was limited to this this mobile laser.  This allowed the surviving drones to successfully reinforce the prepositioned assets before departing for recovery.

One the second day, the Joint Force Commander decided, based on the high degree of success so far, to accelerate the battle plan and takedown the entire A2/AD system without delay. The takedown assault began with an attack by hypersonic MIRVed missiles launched by F-35s in the north and converted Aegis cruisers at the edge of the peer’s defensive envelope.  These missiles released mesh networked MIRVs with the cognitive capability to rapidly evaluate their local situation and adopt the appropriate tactics during the handful of seconds available in the reentry phase.  To their credit, the MIRVs worked as expected, and they were able to take out the mobile RAS lasers that had been so problematic the day before.   Simultaneous with this, the forward deployed RAS forces sprang into action.  Cyber weapons forced the systems they had penetrated into critical collapse and the RAS UUVs in client state’s harbor blew up two peer munitions transports, crippling resupply efforts.  In few short hours, the entire defense grid, with tens of thousands of PGMs still unused, was down and Air Force and Navy continuous monitoring by flights of man/machine teams went into action to ensure it stayed dark.

The moment the grid went down, the third and final phase of the operation was launched.  This phase leveraged the automation of the US military’s logistics system to rapidly stage a ground assault force to secure the area.  Largely automated, this system was able to move men and material at and construct forward bases at an unprecedented pace.  It was so fast, in fact, the Army and the Marines were ready to stage their assaults within a few weeks of the success over the defense grid.  The men on the assault teams were armed with RAS weapons and able to find, identify, track, and engage multiple threats simultaneously.  They were teamed with RAS attack dogs and RAS mules serving as the support base for the swarm of RAS drones constantly gathering information for the team.  

The Army teams moving overland and Marine teams arriving by amphibious assault [in and around the harbor] traveled rapidly within self-driving RAS vehicles.  Since these vehicles, and the drones above them, were all using decentralized movement protocols, thousands of robotics vehicles were able to maintain high speed forward advance without congestion.   Mesh networks connected these ground assault teams with the reinforced prepositioned forces, the combat overwatch above, and each other.  The ground assault’s RAS driven vehicles rapidly converged on the defended points identified by the prepositioned forces.  Despite some hard fought engagement and a few attempted ambushes, the ground assault was over quickly.  It was later determined that that due to the rapidity of the assaults, the peer competitor was completely unprepared for a ground assault.  

Cognitive dominance achieved, the Joint Force Commander accepted the surrender of the enemy commander.

All Hail The Meme, The New King of Political Communications

During this year's US election, what is the most common form of political communication?

Is TV, print, or online advertisements?  No.  

Is TV, print, or online journalism?  No.

The most common form of political messaging is found on social networking.  It's called a meme.  

A meme is an image and with a bit of text that conveys a very precise emotion or idea.  Up until this election, they were usually packaged like this:

Since then, memes have become aggressive products of political communication like this (notice the use of visual language and text to produce a precise emotion):

Millions of memes have been made.  Thousands more are being made every day.  

Once made, they undergo a brutal process of natural selection with the best ending up on sites like Reddit (like the subreddit, The_Donald), where subreddit members critique and vote up the best of them.

Successful memes abound on every social network, often going viral to reach tens of millions of viewers in days as they are rapidly shared with an ever expanding network of friends.

Collectively, memes generate tens of millions of impressions an hour.  Several orders of magnitude (100x) more than any other form of political communication.

Unlike TV, Print, and most forms of online communication, memes are built for consumption on smartphones and visual modes of social networking.  They are also built for speedy consumption, providing a quick emotional hit in comparison to a long winded article with an uncertain payoff.  

Nothing other form of political communications compare.  

Memes are one of ways online conflict, in this case political conflict, is being fought.   These online wars are occurring everywhere, all the time, at every level.   They are deciding the future.

That's why I'm writing a new book called as a natural follow on to my previous book: Brave New War.  

The War Online

How Conflicts are Fought and Won on Social Networks

I haven't decided on a publisher or an agent for it yet.  So, if you are interested in publishing it, ping me at john@johnrobb.org.  Needless to say, I have so many amazingly cool ideas to share and it is becoming so central to our future, I have little doubt it's going to be a hit.

More soon.

John Robb

PS:  This is an example of what Neal Stephenson called a mediaglyph - an icon used for communicating complex ideas with people who never learned how to read.  A future filled with people who can't read, didn't happen.  Reading is common, but having time or the means to read isn't. 

All Hail The MediaGlyph, The New King of Political Communications

During this year's US election, what is the most common form of political communication?

Is TV, print, or online advertisements?  No.  

Is TV, print, or online journalism?  No.

The most common form of political messaging is found on social networking.  It's called a mediaglyph.  

A mediaglyph is an image and with a bit of text that conveys a very precise emotion or idea (aka a meme).  Up until this election, they usually looked like this:

Since then, mediaglyphs have become aggressive products of political communication like this (notice the use of visual language and text to produce a precise emotion):

Millions of them have been made.  Thousands more are being made every day.  

Once made, they undergo a brutal process of natural selection with the best ending up on sites like Reddit (like the subreddit, The_Donald), where subreddit members critique and vote up the best of them.

Successful mediaglyphs blanket social networks, often going viral to reach tens of millions of viewers in days as they are rapidly shared with an ever expanding network of friends.

Collectively, mediaglyphs generate tens of millions of impressions an hour.  Several orders of magnitude (100x) more than any other form of political communication.

Unlike TV, Print, and most forms of online communication, mediaglyphs are built for consumption on smartphones and visual modes of social networking.  They are also built for speedy consumption, providing a quick emotional hit in comparison to a long winded article with an uncertain payoff.  

Nothing other form of political communications compare.  

Mediaglyphs are one of ways online conflict, in this case political conflict, is being fought.   These online wars are occurring everywhere, all the time, at every level.   They are deciding the future.

That's why I'm writing a new book called as a natural follow on to my previous book: Brave New War.  

The War Online

How Conflicts are Fought and Won on Social Networks

I haven't decided on a publisher or an agent for it yet.  So, if you are interested in publishing it, ping me at john@johnrobb.org.  Needless to say, I have so many amazingly cool ideas to share and it is becoming so central to our future, I have little doubt it's going to be a hit.

More soon.

John Robb

PS:  The word mediaglyph was originally used by Neal Stephenson to describe an animated icon used for communication with people who never learned how to read.  That didn't happen.  Reading is common and mediaglyphs emerged as a way to communicate a complex emotion or idea to people who a) in a tight format (a smart phone), b) who don't have time to read something longer, and c) crave an emotional hit of humor, anger, etc.

PPS:  Mediaglyphs are sometimes called memes.  Although they could be considered memes, that's a narrow of the term.  Memes and memetics is a much more complex and often fuzzy subject.  Let's go with mediaglyphs to keep things simple.

 

 

I'm doing Reddit AMA on open source insurgency

I've been asked to do an AMA (ask me anything) with Reddit's largest group (200k members).  

___________

Please join me in welcoming John Robb for an AMA this Friday, August 12th, at 7PM EST!

John is an entrepreneur, defense and political expert who pioneered the theory of open source warfare. You can read much more on his blog, Global Guerrillas.

And you can read John's bio here.

Open source insurgencies are informal associations of many independent groups. Members work towards a “plausible promise” – a shared goal that is broad enough to interpret according to one's own needs.

Global elites are hollowing out the nation-state, creating the vacuum in which open source insurgencies thrive.

Why is this interesting for the election? Because Trump’s campaign is also an open source insurgency. This is the science behind meme magic, and it’s why the establishment is doing everything they can to stop it. But while these types of movements win, something more is needed to build - John is also an expert in decentralized, resilient economies. The type that can bring security and stability in an era of automation and institutional collapse.

If you want to learn more about how Trump's campaign works and what it might mean for the future, you don't want to miss this AMA!

Again, please join me - this Friday, August 12th, at 7PM EST!

A few articles of interest - very much worth the read!

Open Source Insurgency (the basics)

Hollow State Politics

Trump's Insurgency

The American Autumn

Let's Make a Political Party out of Software

Our political system is broken.

How do we fix it? We don't.

We hack it.

We build a political party that works like a network.

How? We turn the party into an app.  Into software.

My collaborator, the successful tech entrepreneur Jordan Greenhall, has a proposal for this.

His proposal? Build an app that allows members of the party to directly control the actions of the representatives they send to Washington. In his proposal, everything that the representative does in Washington, from votes to vetoes should be debated and voted on by the party members within the party app.

However, instead of directly voting on every issue, party members can choose to give their votes to proxies who have the time, the character, and the expertise to make informed decisions on the issue. Once the vote is decided, the elected representative of the party in Washington would then cast that vote.

Would it work? It might.  

It turns political decisions from something done by remote representatives over dinner with lobbyists into a highly participatory activity.  However, due to use of proxies, it can be done without much of the cacophony seen in direct democracy efforts (or the collaborative sausage making we get with apps like piratepad).    

Contrast what would happen with a party like this in this year's election.  

Instead of relentless name calling by a petty press and even pettier candidates, people inside the party network would be engaged in party debates over the issues to be decided before they vote for their candidates in the usual way (in the voting booth).  

As bad as it could be, the party network app would be better than it is today.  From the process of sending people to Washington to what they do after they get there.  

Further, a software based system would undergo an iterative process of improvement, getting better with each failure, rather than the endless groundhog day of failure we currently see. 

I say, let's try it.  What do we have to lose that we aren't losing already?

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: If built correctly, this party as app could run circles around traditional parties. It could even field candidates inside their primaries like the Tea Party and Sanders did, hacking them from inside.

PPS: Summer is coming to a close and I'm looking for something interesting to work on over the next year.  Specifically, I'm looking for a project management or strategy gig in a tech company in either Boston, NYC, or Washington.   If there is a nat defense gig available, I'm up for that too.  Let me know if you have something where I can help you succeed > john@johnrobb.org

The American Autumn

Some thinking you might find useful.  It might sound wild and remote, but we are in a wild and out of control year.  ANYTHING can happen.

A treasure trove of e-mail and voicemail messages from the Democratic National Committee has been leaked.  Here's what happened.

The first installment of the leaked e-mails was released by Wikileaks at the start of the DNC convention.  More leaks have and will follow.


The contents of the leak show a brazen attempt by the DNC to help Hillary win the primary.  It also shows Dem campaign staffers to have acted inappropriately and in a prejudiced manner.


Based on forensic analysis of the leak, it appears that the Russian government is involved

The effects of the leak have been immediate and intense.

The leak provided the confirmation to Sanders supporters that the primary was rigged against them.  This has led to intense protests both within and outside the convention.  This suggests that the Clinton campaign lost a large number of Bernie supporters forever.


The media and the US government reaction to the leak has been aggressive.  They claim that the release is a brazen attempt by Putin to influence the US election by helping Trump win. There have been attempts by the media to tie Trump to Putin but those lack evidence of any connection.


Further, now that the Russian have interfered in our election, it's possible that they will do again.  This could be done through more leaks or as Bruce Schneier has pointed out: a hack of poorly secured voting machines on election day.  

Where could this end up?  This is the interesting part.  This election isn't a normal election.  It is also a good demonstration of something the great scholar of warfare, Martin van Creveld said ~ if you fight barbarians long enough, you become a barbarian too.

The Trumpification of the Establishment >>  Trump isn't running a campaign, he's running an open source insurgency (see my earlier article on this) that makes him nearly immune to personal attack, and it is working.  He has secured a whopping 7 points (47 to 40) lead over Clinton in a recent national poll by the LA Times/USC -- despite the fact that nearly EVERYONE in the media, academic, government, and political establishment is working against him.  This loss of control has infuriated the establishment, leading to increasing levels of paranoia, hyperbole, and anger (particularly in the media).  In short, the establishment is starting to act increasingly like Trump does -- exaggerating and amplifying everything.


Intentional Electoral Disruption.   The potential threat of Russian hacking (voting machines, etc.) fits the scenario I outlined in my freakishly popular US Civil War article from earlier this year.  With the tension between the divisions in the country increasing rapidly as both sides amplify and exaggerate every event, any overt attempt to rig (through disruption or hacking) the outcome of the election could result in widespread violence and/or a national fracture.

The Administrative 'Coup'.  Here's something that I didn't think possible until this week.  The Trumpified establishment might have found an avenue for disqualifying Trump as President:  Trump's rhetorical suggestion that Russian hackers should find Hillary's deleted e-mails.  This has led many people in the establishment to contend that Trump committed 'treason and is now a clear and present danger to the security of the US.'  This national security angle -- the overt interference by Russia in US governance -- could make it possible to block Trump as a candidate on national security grounds. 

Social Violence Networking

It's amazing how quickly social media broadcasting has become central to social violence. It is being used by all of the participants:

Attackers (video was removed):  Larossi Abballa Facebook livestreamed his terrorist attack on the home of a police chief in France.  

Victims:  Diamond Reynolds Facebook livestreamed a policeman shooting her boyfriend while he was reaching for his wallet.

Bystanders . Michael Bautista livestreamed the Dallas police shooting.
 

 
Social Violence Networking 
 
This use of social media has led to a new dynamic that bypasses the "redirecting - calming - slowing" influence of traditional media and the government.  This new dynamic is raw, unfiltered, and fast.  It also radically increases both the likelihood and the intensity of social violence.  
 
Let's dive into some of the details:

Violence as performance art.  Selfies.  Instagram videos.  Twitter.  We've been conditioned to record our experiences using social media.   Naturally, we're are seeing the same thing with violence. Recording violence and showing it to the world, raw and unedited, can be used to "elevate the act" and memorialize it.    NOTE:   ISIS recently stumbled onto this as a way to motivate people to engage in terrorism.  In these cases, the attackers used social media to turn their bloody attacks into both performance art and solemn ceremony.  It gave it meaning. We'll see more of that in the future.


We are bombarded with Instant outrage.  We are more vulnerable to emotional manipulation than ever before.  Our use of social media has changed us.  We are constantly on the hunt for pics, news, stories, and videos that grab our attention and titillate us.  Once we find them, we are then quick to share them with others.  Few things provoke outrage faster than violence and injustice.   It is proving particularly effective when the videos arrive raw and unedited from an individual rather than from the media.  These personal broadcasts have an authenticity, a vulnerability, and an immediacy to them that greatly amplifies their emotional impact.  This makes them more effective at triggering violence than any sterile broadcast from a traditional media outlet. 


Echo chambers.  Our virtual networks on Facebook, Twitter, etc. surrounded us with people who think like we do.  These networks can easily become echo chambers.  Echo chambers that radically amplify outrageous social media videos, spreading the outrage like a contagion.  More importantly, it appears that this amplification can trigger individuals on the fence to engage in violence.

Watch out.

This roiling dynamic for amplifying social violence is very, very dangerous.  It has the potential to rip the lid off of this country faster than we can respond.

 

John Robb

Journal 6.26.2016 Brexit to ISIS

Some items to think about:

Brexit is a true black swan.  Nobody in the mainstream, including the Leave camp, saw it coming.  Even now, based on the analysis being written, few people understand why it won.  Why did it win?  The cosmopolitan, financialized elites saw their incomes grow with globalization, but the deals they struck to "earn" those gains required throwing the bottom 60-70% of the country under the economic bus.  In fact, nearly all of the fast rise out of poverty seen globally was achieved by economically damaging the working populations of the developed world (particularly in the US and the UK).  That lopsided deal is a bomb of anger that has been growing for years.  A bomb that is now going off in the US and the UK.  Strangely, nobody in the establishment is willing to do what is necessary to defuse this bomb.  This means it will get much worse before it gets better.


The response to Brexit will damage nation-state legitimacy.  Efforts to ignore the vote, delay the effects of the vote, and water down the effects of the vote will achieve only one thing:  it will show that the remote technocrats have more legitimacy than the vestiges of democracy that are left. 


A doctoral student at the Univ of Cincinnati built an auto-fighter-pilot AI that runs on Raspberry Pi (a $35 computer).  It was so good, it beat retired US Air Force fighter pilot, Lt. Col. Gene Lee, in three engagements.  

Lee:  "I was surprised at how aware and reactive it was. It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking. It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed." He added that with most AIs, “an experienced pilot can beat up on it (the AI) if you know what you’re doing. Sure, you might have gotten shot down once in a while by an AI program when you, as a pilot, were trying something new, but, until now, an AI opponent simply could not keep up with anything like the real pressure and pace of combat-like scenarios.”

Apparently, the FBI has found that Omar Mateen wasn't gay and that all of the evidence to the contrary was false.  

Bot Platforms and the race for Nation-State Advantage

Bots will transform warfare, from guerrilla warfare to conventional state conflict.  

Before I get to how bots will enable the automation of terrorism (a truly transformational development), let me spend a bit of time on how it will transform nation-state militaries.  

The most important thing for nation-state militaries (US, China, Russia, EU, and India) to understand about bots (both hardware and software) is that it's imperative to get the underlying platforms and standards correct first, before we waste billions on standalone systems.

These platforms include:

Cloud based learning/sharing for bots.  When any bot learns something, it can then share that "understanding" with every other bot connected to the cloud.
Decentralized standards for physical and logical interconnections between bots (NASA is working on this right now for drones, but the FAA and state DMVs are doing their best to hold the US back).
Big Sim and Real World Sandboxes for training and teaching autonomous bots for use in the field.  From crowd training/turking to mission certification.

PS:  Incidentally, the nation-state that is able to set these platforms into motion first, is likely to get the same five year economic, security & technological headstart the US enjoyed with the emergence of the Internet.