by Charlie Edwards | Jun 6, 2008 | Conflict and security
From the Register via Bruce Schneier: The EU is testing an airplane-seat camera system that tries to detect terrorists before they leap up and carry out their attack.
Each camera tracks passengers’ facial expressions, with the footage then analysed by software to detect developing terrorist activity or potential air rage. Six wide-angle cameras are also positioned to monitor the plane’s aisles, presumably to catch anyone standing by the cockpit door with a suspiciously crusty bread roll. But since people never sit still on planes, the software’s also designed so that footage from multiple cameras can be analysed. So, if one person continually walks from his seat to the bathroom, then several cameras can be used to track his facial movements.
The software watches for all sorts of other terrorist-like activities too, including running in the cabin, someone nervously touching their face or excessive sweating. An innocent nose scratch won’t see the F16s scrambled, but a combination of several threat indicators could trigger a red alert.
As Bruce notes all this will do is create a false alarm. After all, do we have records of the sort of facial characteristics that are unique to terrorists as they prime themselves for action?
by Jules Evans | Jun 5, 2008 | Global system
There’s a great story in the FT today by Catherine Belton, who I’ve always rated as the best foreign journalist in Russia. She’s something of a workaholic, and is so dedicated to her job that it made the rest of us look like part-time dilettantes.
Her story charts the deeping problems of BP in Russia. BP owns 50% of a joint venture, TNK-BP, with three Russian oligarchs, called Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik. The venture was signed in 2003, amid great fanfare, was personally blessed by Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin, and was seen as a sign of Russia having taken a step up to a new level of business maturity, reliability and, well, civilization in short.
Five years on, things are looking rough. The problem is that the Russian state wants to get involved in some of TNK-BP’s biggest projects, and maybe take a stake in the company itself. BP is quite keen to get Gazprom involved, because it would make things politically easier, and wants the Russian oligarchs to sell their stake to Gazprom, making the new company Gazprom-BP.
But the Russian oligarchs don’t want to be told what to do, not by the Russian government and certainly not by BP. They’ve felt left out of negotiations between BP and Gazprom, and now they’re starting to get rough. What’s happening now is effectively a civil war between the Russians and BP within TNK-BP.
One of the Russian managers was meant to apply for permits for the 150 western managers in TNK-BP, but he applied for less than half of them, so half the foreign managers may have to leave Russia in July. The Russian shareholders are also trying to install managers loyal to them on the board of subsidiaries. And, above all, they’re trying to get the CEO of TNK-BP, an ex-BP guy called Robert Dudley, to quit.
BP have refused to fire Robert Dudley, so now Dudley has found himself called in as a witness to a criminal investigation on tax evasion at a TNK-BP subsidiary. Hey, that’s how they roll out there.
If Dudley is forced to resign, and the foreign managers lose their permits to work in Russia, then BP is in real trouble. It will suddenly find itself with very little control over the company, and with little protection against the oligarchs embarking on a merry spree of asset stripping. TNK-BP is fairly crucial to BP’s plans – it accounts for 24% of its production, and the majority of its replenished reserves and future production.
The question is, what will the Kremlin do? Putin told Le Monde last week that he always had his doubts about the merger: “I told them [BP] ‘Don’t do it. Agree to one of you having a controlling stake. They will always have frictions over who is the boss.'” Doesn’t sound good for BP.
But if they were forced out or robbed, that would be a real blow for Russia’s image as a civilized place in which to do business. As one foreign manager at TNK-BP tells Catherine: “I’ve been here five years, and sometimes you forget. There have been alot of improvements. But really you have to remember it’s a jungle still.”
by Mark Weston | Jun 5, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Among the most popular policy responses to recent rises in food prices are export bans. Cambodia has banned rice exports, for example. Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran have refused to export wheat to hungry neighbours like Afghanistan. And Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries that has been hardest hit by the price rises, has banned cereal exports to neighbouring Ghana.
Such measures have been widely criticised, but they are not new. I recently came across FJ Pedler’s ‘Economic Geography of West Africa’, published by Longmans in 1955. Among many other interesting topics, he writes about the maize shortages of 1947. He notes the wildly fluctuating price of guinea-corn in the Zaria region of Nigeria, which rose from £8 per ton in 1946 to £38 per ton a year later. “These price movements,” he says, “are an indication that too little food is produced to meet the needs of the people throughout the year.” Traders take advantage of this, buying up food at harvest time to sell it later when prices rise (a bit like today’s commodities traders, who have been stocking up on food): “They are often blamed for high prices and scarcity [plus ça change…], but their action is the result of shortage, not the cause of it.”
As in today’s crisis, Mr Pedler reports that governments “often get frightened by the high prices and shortages…and prohibit the movement of food from one place to another.” Like Burkina Faso today, West African governments in the 1950s banned the export of guinea-corn from one state to another – in this case, from Katsina Province into Zaria Province. It didn’t help then either, and Pedler explains why the approach is flawed:
It is difficult to defend these bans on economic grounds. If they are effective, they prevent food from moving to the place where people will pay most for it. This must drive prices even higher in the needy area: while in the producing area an artificially low price is maintained, so that there is less economic incentive for farmers to increase their production.
Little has been learnt, it seems, in the intervening half-century. However, as Mr Pedler observed back then, the bans are easily evaded; “their principal effect is to add to the cost of transport by making it necessary for traders to avoid control posts or bribe the guards.” Good news for the corrupt, then, but bad news for the hungry.
by Daniel Korski | Jun 4, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia
A few weeks ago, Charlie suggested that Afghanistan’s opium economy might benefit from skyrocketing food prices.
But the trajectory is unlikely to change, as farmers choose to grow opium for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they grow because they have to repay opium-denominated debt. Sometimes the transaction costs of growing non-opium crops are too high. These include bribes to be paid to Afghan policemen on the way to market. Finally – and while I am no expert on this – high energy prices (one of the causes of rising food prices) also increases the cost of growing non-opium crops i.e gasolin to take products to market and to make fertilizer etc.
In this piece, I try to lay out a way forward for the Afghan government. In short:
First, the international community must forego the idea that it can sequence coercive and development activities; it is simply not possible given the conditions now and in the foreseeable future.
Second, the international community needs to take aerial eradication off the table and make clear that traffickers, not farmers, are the problem.
Instead, the government should focus on rolling out the Afghan state, prioritizing the provision of security to local farmers. The international community, in turn, should focus on building local capacity to maintain security and deliver basic services and tackle the corrupt Afghan National Police. Such an approach will allow the gradual introduction of basic services and access to licit sources of income.
A “stability-first” policy needs to be coupled with arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these “narcotics entrepreneurs” are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change. A special UN-backed narcotics court should be set up to do this.
Narcotics threatens to negate all of Afghanistan’s (dwindling) post-2001 achievements and a new policy is clearly needed. But will the international community act?
by David Steven | Jun 4, 2008 | Articles and Publications, Speeches
Speech by David Steven to the UK Defence Academy’s Advanced Research and Assessment Group seminar on Strategic Communications, Public Diplomacy and Afghanistan (4 June 2008).
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