Fear the vook?
Posted 19 Nov 09
Coming to this a little late, I know. A vook is text plus video, merged into an iPhone app — the latest incarnation of our long-promised “multimedia book.”
So, the death of literacy? (Again?) Actually, I can’t get too worked up, this time. A ‘vook’ is just a hyped-up comic book, really, and even graphic novels never managed to kill the real kind.
To me the larger problem is that words-on-paper is, in itself, perfected. The reading experience is never going to be better than that, because it can’t be. So any bells and whistles added on only degrade the experience, however slightly. And that, in the end, pushes people AWAY from books, it doesn’t draw them in.
Or rather, more hopefully, it pushes people away from vooks, and back to real reading.
This post indexed as: Reading, Technology
Battlefield Improvisation
Posted 18 Nov 09
Stories of US soldiers outfitting themselves with non-standard equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan are now commonplace: better boots, thermal socks, even — until recently prohibited — their own body armor. Oakley sunglasses are so popular that counterfeits are sold right on base, out of local concessions.
Blame the size of the military bureaucracy, cumbersome procurement procedures, or the simple vastness of the supply chain. More interesting, in some ways, are the improvisations made by poorer forces. I still remember a photo I saw years ago of a Chadian rebel unit, barreling over the desert in a Chevrolet pickup with an anti-aircraft gun mounted in the bed — a homebuilt anti-tank platform. Of course nowadays the “tacticals,” as they’re still sometimes called in the Horn of Africa, use Toyotas. Bricks stacked in the doors serve for armor; a heavy machine gun goes in the back; and a half-dozen young men in bandannas, carrying AKs, hop in.
An airborne example just showed up on the internet. In 2007 the Lebanese military, attacking a force holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp but lacking jets, turned a Huey helicopter into a bomber.
Asymmetric warfare in particular depends on this sort of re-purposing, at least for the poorer side. IEDs are a much less glamorous example.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
Workplace Infiltration
Posted 18 Nov 09
Black-bag jobs don’t always require alarm bypass, lockpicking, and roping down from the skylight. Sometimes you can simply walk in.
Lunch hour is a good time, and it helps to wear a nice suit.
Unfortunately, petty criminals have figured this out too. An article in the WSJ describes a growing incidence of armed robbery inside small, white-collar offices. Increased security at other, more cash-rich locations — retail operations, for example — has driven scavengers toward softer targets.
This post indexed as: Crime
The Laundries
Posted 16 Nov 09
At some point, if you write “big” thrillers, somebody is going to have to deal with millions and millions of illicit dollars. For all its supposed complexity, money laundering really isn’t that hard — mostly because intermediaries all along the way get a cut. Since these intermediaries include large, politically powerful banks in the US and Europe, regulatory intereference is scant. Basically you just keep transferring the money through shell companies in pliant jurisdictions until the trail is muddy.
Particularly useful are the so-called tax havens: countries with extremely lax rules about everything except privacy, which they guard zealously. Switzerland is no longer a desirable location, not since UBS rolled over and gave up details on hundreds of their tax-evading American clients. But there are plenty of others willing to step up.
An article in the current New York Review of Books provides a nice summary of current options. (Behind a firewall, though, so you have to cough up three bucks or, better yet, go buy a copy on the newsstand.)  Russian oligarchs prefer Cyprus, for example. Australians like Vanuatu. And Chinese criminals flow much of their black money through the British Virgin Islands.
The author is pessimistic about anti-laundering efforts. That is bad for developing countries and the world economy generally, but possibly good for your plot.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance
Russian Crime
Posted 13 Nov 09
I have a long-standing interest in Russian criminal society. Really, who doesn’t? It’s got everything: a long history, tradition-bound elders confronting ruthless youth, violence, vast conspiracies, and deep ties to both local police and the national state. If you want colorful villains, the mafiya are hard to beat.
The problem is how to learn more, especially if, like me, you don’t speak Russian. Babelfish only gets you so far, and after a brief flowering of interest post-collapse-of-Communism, there isn’t much of an English-language bibliography.
Still, some sources exist. One of the best is Mark Galeotti, an academic who seems to know more than anyone about the subject. Unfortunately he hasn’t become a two-posts-a-day blogger. But if you search out his byline, occasional interesting articles come along. For example: these RFE commentaries, or his infrequent but fascinating blog. And I’m looking forward to his next book, POLITICS OF SECURITY IN MODERN RUSSIA, apparently due out next year.
This post indexed as: Crime
Master Lock Crack
Posted 12 Nov 09
In the real world, Master locks are weak, weak security, easily cut open with any assistant principal’s bolt cropper. Still, sometimes your infiltration team will prefer to leave no trace. It turns out that rather than 40^3 = 64,000 possible combinations, simple manipulation can reduce this number to 100 — few enough to work through in a quarter hour or so. And you don’t even have to memorize the technique. Mark Edward Campos has created a simple, one-page graphic you can print out and carry around. Be prepared for your next lockout!
This post indexed as: Crime, Technology
The Juggle
Posted 11 Nov 09
Not the WSJ’s feature column, actual juggling. In college I learned three and four-ball juggling (pretty much all I learned freshman year, in fact). Lately I’ve taken up clubs, and after a few months I can keep three airborne fairly well. Double-spins are coming along, and I’ve just started to manage two-in-one-hand — left and right.
Crosswords don’t actually prevent Alzheimer’s, and juggling isn’t going to stave off arthritis. But there’s something to be said for practicing a small skill, and getting better at it.
It would be nice to think writing is like that.
This post indexed as: Personal
Armageddon
Posted 10 Nov 09
Someone’s blockbuster plot is assembling itself in Pakistan. Officials are openly talking about the possibility of a coup, or of radicals within the military taking over the country’s nuclear arsenal.
As usual Seymour Hersh has elicited some striking off-the-record comments. From a “Special Forces advisor”:
We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two … The Pakistan military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.
That’s a nice image for the elevator pitch.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military, Writing
DEA, Abroad Again
Posted 10 Nov 09
Twenty years ago, the Drug Enforcement Agency began sending paramilitary teams abroad, to conduct “counter-drug” operations at the source. These efforts, begun during the Reagan administration and known as Operation Snowcap, ended in 1994, after a plane crash in Peru killed five DEA agents.
It turns out the DEA teams were revived and have been back in action for more than five years, in Afghanistan. Known as FAST — “Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams” — the agents seem to be involved in rather more than giving advice. Interestingly, although the DEA is part of the Justice Department, the FAST teams are largely funded and supported by the Pentagon.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
Who’s Who in the IC
Posted 10 Nov 09
I read a British thriller recently that included an American covert-operations team — the usual black-bag stuff, infiltration, assassination, like that. The author must have had a tight deadline, because he made these operatives employees of the National Security Agency.
I guess to a foreign audience that sounded good enough, but of course the NSA doesn’t do any of that. They hire cryptographers and network analysts, not ex-SOF paramilitaries.
But it’s easy to get confused. The US has a vast, sprawling, and almost incomprehensible range of organizations involved in intelligence. Broadly speaking they may be divided into military and “civilian” agencies. The former includes, for example, the DOD’s Special Forces Command, and each service arm’s own intelligence units. The latter houses the CIA, the NSA, and innumerable others. The civilian side alone has a budget in the current fiscal year of nearly $50 billion; the military side is still kept secret. (You can “see” the Military Intelligence Program’s budget, every last line of which is redacted, here.)
The point is that if your plot requires spies and secret agents, there are many, many more choices than Langley. Is the villain smuggling a nuclear bomb in on a container ship? Coast Guard Intelligence could save the day. Is the warhead going the other way — stolen from a US decommissioning operation, for example? The Air Force Office of Special Investigations might be involved. Need someone to run down al-Qaeda’s hawala donors? Your hero could come from Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Financial Analysis. And so forth.
Of course, for many authors (and readers) such background wonkery is unnecessary — give your protagonist some Krav Maga training, stubble and an authority problem, and you’re done. For me, though, it’s a little like firearms. Sure, I could just hand out “pistols” and “rifles” and “MAC-10s” to my characters and let it go. (“MAC-10s” is a joke, you know that, right? A topic for another post …) But readers like more detail than that, so I do the research. It doesn’t take too much time.
Finally, the point of this entire post: the best survey of American spy agencies I know of is Jeffrey Richelson’s The US Intelligence Community. Sure, it’s incomplete; necessarily so, since chairs move around in the bureaucracy faster than Richelson’s 3-4 year revision cycle can keep up with. And plenty of material is available online, if you can sort through the reliability questions. But for an all-in-one reference, this book cannot be beat.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military