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Benjamin Duranske at Virtually Blind flags up a paper by Bart Schermer, partner in consultancy firm Considerati and an assistant professor at the University of Leiden (Faculty of Law) in the Netherlands, Alan Turing and the Matrix: Intelligent Systems for Law Enforcement in Virtual Worlds [.pdf]. It’s a thought-provoking short article, and I’m just going to pull out a few items of particular interest.

Due to the popularity of the MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online roleplaying games] and virtual worlds, where millions of people now interact on a daily basis, their relevance is becoming ever greater within our society. This relevance is heightened by the fact that virtual worlds are not isolated from the real world. While it is possible to view the ‘virtual world’ and the ‘physical world’ (i.e., the real world) as two distinct environments, they interact to a large extent. As such the boundaries of the physical world and the virtual world become blurred. The area where the virtual world touches upon the real world can best be described as ‘interreality’ (Kokswijk, 2003). A good example of this phenomenon is people willing to pay real money for virtual goods. Interreality raises all sorts of interesting possibilities for social interaction and economic activities, however it can also lead to various forms of deviant behavior.

I like the term ‘interreality’. It lends itself well to describing the fuzzy cognitive interface between the Real and the Virtual. It does slightly mask the fact that this is a contingent relationship - the Virtual currently cannot exist without the Real.

The notion of crime is somewhat difficult in MMORPGs and virtual worlds. First of all, defining certain types of behavior in virtual worlds as deviant implies almost by definition regulation of the virtual environment by a central authority … the rules of social conduct within virtual worlds may differ from those in the real world. Thus, functional equivalence of the rules of criminal law in MMORPGs and virtual worlds is not a given.

This is an excellent point, although one far too subtle for most law enforcement agencies to grasp. Their understanding of normative behaviour is likely to be grounded purely in the Real. In a sense, this is correct - why bother with a Virtual infringement if it has no effect in the Real?

Schermer identifies three types of ‘deviant’ behavior - cheating (often endemic and desirable in MMORPG gameplay); virtual crime (theft of virtual goods with Real world value, as in gold farming and captcha solving, slander, defamation, identity fraud, stimulative paedophilia simulation). The third type Schermer defines is that of ‘preparatory actions’:

[The] Internet has contributed greatly to the communication capabilities of organized crime and international terrorism. Through websites, email, internet relay chat (IRC), and instant messaging programs (AOL IM, MSN), criminals and terrorists can communicate effectively and in relative safety. However, criminals are also aware of the fact that their modes of electronic communication can be monitored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Therefore, they may turn to less conspicuous forms of communication such as interacting with one another in MMORPGs or virtual worlds.

Note the qualification ‘may’. The present consensus is that terrorist use of virtual worlds is minimal, although this is likely to change. Contrast considered research with the breathless reporting of last summer, in which The Australian and its News Corporation sister The Times of London claimed that “the dismantling and disruption of military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan after September 11 forced terrorists to turn to the virtual world.” This notion of ‘virtual sanctuary’ is riddled with conceptual errors as it is, and the facts do not support even the basic premise of these stories.

But, as Schermer says:

It is likely that with the increasing popularity of virtual worlds, virtual crime will become a more serious problem over time. Therefore, at some point in time law enforcement in virtual worlds may become necessary. When it comes to the policing of cyberspace, surveillance plays an important role. For the context of this article, three levels of surveillance play a particular role, viz. 1) surveillance at the IP level, 2) surveillance at the application level, and 3) surveillance at the interaction level.

I agree with this, and Schermer suggests three ways that software agents might undertake surveillance in lieu of human agents. Unobtrusive agents are disembodied elements of the invisible surveillance infrastructure. Avatars could simulate real-life police officers, and would be visible and accessible in-world, much like the ‘bobby-on-the-beat’ model of traditional policing. The third option is undercover agents, posing as normal avatars, and interacting socially with other residents or players. These would not be immediately recognisable as surveillance operatives, as they would pass the Turing test by demonstrating plausible intelligence. They would also be subject to the same risks as real-life agents engaged in surveillance, entrapment and infiltration operations.

Schermer suggests the following legal ramifications:

When we examine the use of software agents for surveillance on the interaction level, it is my opinion we must distinguish between software agents that merely ‘patrol’ cyberspace, and software agents that interact more directly with inhabitants of virtual worlds. For the most part, I feel that the first type of surveillance is part of the normal police task and that as such new rules are not necessary. When software agents actually start interacting with inhabitants of the virtual world, new rules will likely be necessary. The reason for this is that, in general, these agents will be more intelligent and will operate within the personal sphere of the player, where they could form a greater threat to privacy and liberty.

My immediate thought is: within whose jurisdiction does it fall to uphold rights to privacy and liberty? I’d like to think that recent initiatives like Project Reynard will consider the legal implications of policing cyberspace. Does international rights legislation apply? If the internet is non-locative physical space, as I’m beginning to think it should be considered, how do we determine jurisdiction? Through consideration of nationality of actors? ISP location? Location of intended acts? Location of virtual acts - game servers? The virtual world Tribal Net (out in beta this week) uses a distributed network of user-owned PC-based servers - another innovation likely to fox current legal frameworks.

These issues are not going to go away.

It’s highly unlikely that I’ll have the chance to mention Canada twice in a day for some time, even with the Stanley Cup coming up, so here goes.

Alfred Hermida reports that Canada’s broadcast watchdog, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is undertaking a public consultation exercise on how it should deal with the internet, in particular whether it should extend regulatory oversight to the medium.

As part of its public consultation, the CRTC released a 75-page report (.pdf) on research and attitudes to the Internet that provides some insight into how the media landscape is changing in Canada.

The report frames the debate in terms of preserving and promoting “Canadian content in a global new media broadcasting environment”. The CRTC is approaching the Internet as a broadcast medium, much like television or radio. This reveals a fundamental misconception of the net, as it is not less of a one-to-many and more of a many-to-many medium. But the public consultation is framed within the notion of the net as another form of broadcast…

However, Canadian media organisations would do well to take notice of how audiences are changing. The CRTC report found that high-speed residential Internet access is now available to 93% of households across the country and has been adopted by more than 60% of Canadian households.

It will come as no surprise that youngsters lead the way. According to the CRTC report:

* In 2006, 91% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 accessed the Internet, compared to only 69% of Canadians aged 55 or older.
* In December 2006, approximately 30% of Canadian adults online connected for more than 10 hours per week. This compares to 52% for young Canadian adults aged 18 to 24.
* Canadians under 18 now spend roughly the same amount of time online as they do watching TV - between 15 and 17 hours).

Clearly a shift is taking place in media consumption, so a debate on Canada’s approach to new media is timely. People have until July 11 to file comments, and the CRTC plans to hold public hearings in early 2009.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports on a curious use of virtual worlds in the educational context:

Even as some panic about the possibility of terrorist exploitation of Second Life, a program in Canada is using the virtual world to catch people at the border.

Loyalist College in Ontario has created a virtual simulation of a US-Canada border crossing, enabling students to practice quizzing travelers about their backgrounds. The program is one of several at the school that uses virtual worlds technology, including sims that teach prison guards and journalists. Almost ten percent of the student body has used Second Life in the course of their schoolwork.

One big draw for Loyalist is the low cost of building in a virtual world — no consultants were hired to build the simulations. “We figured out early the way to make it efficient is to do everything ourselves,” said Ken Hudson of the school’s Virtual World Design Centre. Hudson works with five part-time designers to build and maintain the simulations, all of whom are graduates of the school’s animation program.

Here’s some footage from the ‘virtual border guard training’:

I doubt that claiming the Third Amendment against non-consensual harbouring of military botnet code would work but it’s a nice idea.

Amendment 3 - Quartering of Soldiers. Ratified 12/15/1791:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

(h/t harflimon at Brainsturbator)

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On Monday 13 May, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation led an evening seminar at King’s College London, ‘British Muslims: Identity, Integration and Policy’. Hussain is the well-respected head of the Policy Research Unit and Senior Research Fellow at the foundation, and also serves on the board of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK. Hussain is the co-author of British Muslims Between Assimilation and Segregation: Historical, Legal and Social Realities (2004) and has also written several op-eds, not least a rebuke to charges of extremism laid at the door of the Islamic Foundation by the BBC Panorama programme in 2005.

Hussain describes the construction of modern British ‘Muslimness’ - encompassing a plurality all too often overlooked - as an ongoing negotiation of inherited identities. First, as the ‘Other’ (black), passing through the continental (Asian), national (Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc) to the current situation in which many Muslims define their primary identity as religious. He outlined the internal and external drivers of this evolution, the latter including the oil crises and Middle East wars of the 1970s, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the Satanic Verses affair a decade later. Critical events of the 1990s, like the genocide in Bosnia, 9/11 and 7/7 further served to polarise Muslims in opposition to notions of statehood and nationality, preferring instead to identify with their religion and the global ummah. More than ever, the tensions of hyphenated identity are being laid bare.

Read the rest of this article here.

An interesting graphic from Intelligence Online in a short article, How the Pentagon is Organizing its Cyber Warfare System (requires free registration), showing the command hierarchy of USSTRATCOM:

The NATO equivalent, the Cyber Defence Management Authority, is not yet up and running, despite its launch being expected at the Bucharest Summit last month. If anyone can point me to something concrete about its proposed organisational structure, I’d be most interested. NATO’s Centre of Excellence for Co-operative Cyber Defence in Tallinn, Estonia is also not operational yet.

Jihadica wrote the following

On May 10, 2008 Ekhlaas member mohanad57 posted a link to Encyclopedia of Modern U.S. Military Weapons in pdf format. Like most illicit material shared by Jihadis, the link takes you to an independent file sharing site (in this case, rapidshare.com). This keeps the forum managers from getting in trouble, reduces bandwidth consumption, ensures that files can be shared rapidly, and makes the links temporary. For all you jihadologists out there: If there is a download you want on a Jihadi forum, get it immediately – the link will stop working in a few days.

And keeps intelligence services on their toes, to boot. The digital mobility of jihadis, and other terrorist and insurgents, contrasts wildly with the atrophied institutional outlook and methods of those attempting to monitor their activities. This might be a slightly unfair criticism - the advantage is most definitely with he who acts first when it comes to utilising the web - but the point still stands.

[cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab Review]

I’ve mentioned Slavoj Žižek elsewhere before, and will doubtless do so again. The Slovenian polymath is both prolific and notorious, describing himself once as an ‘orthodox Lacanian Stalinist‘ but he is of course much more than that.

Žižek is one of those authors that makes me want to steal his books, such would one’s intellectual armoury be if one could actually grasp a significant fraction of the ideas he throws at the reader. Browsing in the university library yesterday I happened upon a copy of his 1997 Plague of Fantasies which includes a chapter entitled ‘Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being’. At the risk of seeming an uncritical fanboy here is a selection of quotables from that chapter:

Does [cyberspace] not involve the promise of false opening (the spiritualist prospect of casting off our ‘ordinary’ bodies, turning into a virtual entity which travels from one virtual space to another) as well as the foreclosure of the social power relations within which virtual communities operate?

… today’s process of transition allows us to perceive what we are losing and what we are gaining - this perception will become impossible the moment we fully embrace, and feel fully at home in, the new technologies. In short, we have the privilege of occupying the place of ‘vanishing mediators’.

After a gentle, yet piercing, rebuke to Sherry Turkle among others, he cuts to the chase, the paradox at the heart of his argument:

… first, within ‘objective reality’ itself the difference between ‘living’ and ‘artificial’ entities is undermined; then the distinction between ‘objective reality’ and its appearance gets blurred; finally, the identity of the self which perceives something (be it appearance or ‘objective reality’) explodes. This progressive ’subjectivization’ is strictly correlative to its opposite, to the progressive ‘externalization’ of the hard kernel of subjectivity. This paradoxical coincidence … has its roots in the fact that today, with VR and technobiology, we are dealing with the loss of the surface which separates inside from outside. This loss jeopardizes our most elementary perception of ‘our own body’ … it cripples our standard phenomenological attitude towards the body of another person, in which we suspend our knowledge of what actually exists beneath the skin (glands, flesh…) and conceive the surface (of a face, for example) as directly expressing the ’soul’. On the one hand, inside is always outside: … techno-computerized prostheses … function as an internal part of our ‘living’ organism … the technological colonization of our body itself. On the other hand, outside is always inside: when we are directly immersed in VR, we lose contact with reality - electro-waves bypass the interaction of external bodies and directly attack our senses: ‘it is the eyeball that now englobes man’s entire body’ [quoting Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor].

Thereafter follows a long discursus on cyberspace, heavily filtered through a Lacanian lens. Stephen Hawking as an icon of our time - ‘his body, reduced to an immobile mass of flesh, kept functioning by mechanical prostheses and contacting the world through clicking a computer mouse, tells us something about the general state of subjectivity today.’ ‘Where is the decentred subject?’, ‘The phantasmic hypertext’, ‘Informational anorexia’ ['the desperate refusal to accept information, in so far as it occludes the presence of the Real'] and ‘What can meteorology teach us about racism?’ [I'm still not sure].

At the end of it all, Žižek poses this:

We thus arrive at the notion of a purely virtual catastrophe: although, in ‘real life’, nothing whatsoever happens, and things seem to follow their course, the catastrophe is total and complete, since ‘reality’ is all of a sudden deprived of its symbolic support …. As is well known, all large armies are today more and more playing virtual war games, winning or losing battles on computer screens, battles which simulate every conceivable condition of ‘real’ war [er, not quite, I would suggest]. So the question naturally crops up: if we have virtual sex, and so on, why not virtual warfare? Why shouldn’t ‘real’ warfare be replaced by a gigantic virtual war which will be over without the majority of ordinary people being aware that there was any war at all, like the virtual catastrophe which will occur without any perceptible change in the ‘real’ universe? Perhaps, radical virtualization - the fact that the whole of reality will soon be ‘digitalized’, transcribed, redoubled in the ‘big Other’ of cyberspace - will somehow redeem ‘real life’, opening it up to a new perception …

Heady stuff. Of course, none of this looks like coming to pass just yet. As far as I’m concerned, the web - of which online virtual worlds are currently integral - still consists of physical space. Actions in the ‘ether’ reconstitute as physical reactions in the real world, just as thoughts, emotions and mouse-clicks are transmitted as physical particles across a physical network. So-called ‘virtual war’ in the contemporary context is still very much focused on gaining access to, and control over, material infrastructure, even if a casualty of a digital tussle is sometimes data.

Perhaps Žižek is right, although it’s hard to see in pragmatic terms how the ‘virtual’ will ever be anything but a function of physical reality. I see Žižek’s ideas on this issue as useful theorising, but would also say: approach with caution!

Moving Beyond Globalization, Steve DeAngelis - critiquing a recent article in the New York Times by David Brooks. DeAngelis suggest that globalisation is not ‘universal’ and that while there might be an argument for America to transcend the globalisation paradigm this is simply not possible for many people in less fortunate parts of the world. He does quote an interesting passage from Brooks though:

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches - the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

This is an important and often overlooked element of the ‘knowledge economy’ debate. Cognition, comprehension and interpretation are critical elements in creating ‘information’ from ‘data’ and imbuing it with socially contructed meaning, semantic meaning.

Technocrat flags up a March 2008 article, The Connection Has Been Reset, James Fallows at The Atlantic - how the ‘Great Firewall of China’ will be ‘modified’ during the forthcoming quadrennial snoozefest:

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement - and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses - certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games.

Update: an interview with Fallows can be found here.

Dan tdaxp has a pop at John Robb:

John clearly has a good marketing mind (agitprop against the status quo is always a seller), though I feel sorry for those who are introduced to serious topics through his writing.

Via Savage Minds, a Guardian article, Are we there just to help the Army aim better? - their Education section looks at the continuing debate over the US Human Terrain System.

IntelliBriefs, Lebanon: Hezbollah’s Communication Network:

The Lebanese government has decided to dismantle Shiite militant group Hezbollah’s communications network — the very thing that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the group’s most important weapon. Not only did the government’s decision spark protests and violence, but the network — which spans Beirut and reaches through the Bekaa Valley to the area along the Israeli-Lebanese border — could prove difficult to take down [via Jeff Kouba, Peace Like a River].

The Blue Book: A consumer guide to virtual worlds, MetaSecurity - if you ever thought Second Life and World of Warcraft were the only ones, think again [.pdf].

Dusan Writer, MSNBC Reports on Advances of VW/RW Merger:

Are we closer to living in a “Matrix”-style virtual world? Some sophisticated new projects are showing just how far we’ve come toward creating the visual, tactile and conversational elements of an eye, hand and ear-fooling virtual world.

I love Pruned. Alexander Trevi has unearthed some incredible photos of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota:

Jeremy Kahn in Newsweek, War is the Answer: Sri Lanka’s leaders are testing a dangerous theory: that the best way to end a civil war is by winning it.

That’s not quite what Kahn argues at all, so boo! to the sub-editors at Newsweek for letting me down. What Kahn actually says is that although the government military and police have made significant gains over the last two years, against a relatively traditional Maoist-style insurgency, the LTTE is still a potent adversary. President Rajapaksa faces increasing political opposition within his own ranks, as well as an inflationary economy, external debt problems, and a general public tiring of the war.

Achieving [military] victory is still possible, analysts say. “If somehow [the government] can kill Prabhakaran, that would change the picture dramatically,” says one senior analyst for a Western NGO in Colombo. Barring that, if the Army can deliver a few significant victories before January, it may buy Rajapaksa enough good will among the Sinhalese to allow him to continue the fight. For that reason, security experts expect another major push before the rainy season begins in June.

But the best chance for peace, analysts agree, involves combining the military campaign with a political strategy to empower moderate Tamil politicians and deprive the LTTE of support. Most Tamils on the island oppose the Tigers’ calls for independence, though they do want more autonomy. Under a 1987 accord brokered by India, Sri Lanka passed a constitutional amendment that was supposed to transfer some powers to the provinces. But the Tigers refused to disarm as called for under the accord, and the amendment was never implemented in Tamil areas.

Seems eminently sensible, and fits the bill of a rounded COIN approach (if implemented) to the Sri Lankan situation. Kahn concludes:

Without a more serious effort to redress discrimination, however, many international commentators believe the military campaign can’t succeed. The fighting alone “cannot be the whole solution, because that alone won’t address the grievances of the minority community,” says Susan Hayward of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. Unfortunately, Rajapaksa, who is surrounded by Sinhalese hardliners, has shown little interest in truly reaching out to the Tamils. Which means that while there may well be a military solution to Sri Lanka’s civil war, it probably isn’t this one.

Doesn’t quite suit the headline, methinks. Kahn presumably grasps the requirements of successful COIN, but his editors obviously do not.

For those within reach of Manchester, UK, this lecture could be interesting:

The Seventh Cardwell Memorial Lecture in the History of Technology

Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester

Professor John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology
“Science, technology and American hegemony”

Tuesday May 27 2008, 5pm
Michael Smith Lecture Theatre, University of Manchester, UK

This talk will describe how scientific and technological exchange between the United States and Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s served as an instrument of American foreign policy. The focus will be on domains in which there is a porous barrier between the civil and the military, notably nuclear and missile technologies. It will show how the US, deploying its technological leadership in an asymmetric field of force, tried both to strengthen and to channel European technological capabilities, steering them down avenues that cohered with its commercial, political and military interests in the region.

More details here.