Monthly Archives: September 2006

Politics

Mark Thomas at The Anvil

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Tonight we, together with Phil, Howard and Lindsay, and Fuller and Adi, went along to see Mark Thomas at the Anvil in Basingstoke. Well I say that, he was actually performing in the ‘more intimate’ surroundings of the Forge, which from the outside looks to be the cupboard under the stairs, whilst there was Tango Fire going on in the main theatre. However, that did provide us with an interesting game of trying to spot who were there for the dancing, and who were there for Mark Thomas, (and a few worrying moments for Adi when she thought she was decidedly badly dressed for the show…)

Mark Thomas Book plus Appendix

Anyway, the theme of Mark’s show is the arms trade, and covers much the same subject area as his book, “As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Tradeâ€?. Having said that the live show doesn’t necessarily follow the book religiously, indeed on a couple of occasions during the show he reacted to heckles from the audience, sometimes digressing.

Having said that, the show begins with something that doesn’t seem massively related to the arms trade, with Mark’s ongoing campaign against part of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. As part of that act a demonstration exclusion zone of up to one kilometre from Parliament Square was set up, primarily in an attempt to get rid of Brian Haw who has been holding a one man protest in the square since 2001. As a result, anybody who wishes to protest in the square and a number of surrounding areas has to apply to the Police six days in advance for permission to protest. However you can protest against anything, so Mark has been mounting a campaign against the law by holding a number of protests in the square, including a protest against the law itself, and a protest against the Police officer who signs off on the permissions to protest. He has also been involved in organising a mass lone protest, where large numbers of people mounted different single person protests at the same time, including such pressing issues as providing free chocolate, and ending dullness. Having filled in the relevant form, all of the protests were totally legal.

One of the next protests, on November 5th will also highlight the problems of parts of the Terrorism Act 2006, by holding a Guy Fawkes demonstration – because Bonfire Night contravenes section 3 of the new law which states that “any act that glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) of such acts or offences” is illegal. There are a number of pictures of previous SOCPA in the SOCPA Flickr group, including pictures of Mark himself.

As you may be aware, Mark has campaigned against the arms trade for a number of years, and has been involved in several protests and stunts at the DSEi arms trade fair held every two years in London. In previous years he laid on a courtesy bus from a hotel used by traders at the fair, and even chained himself to the axle of another bus used to transport traders. This resulted in his picture being included in a Police list of possible troublemakers at the next fair, however thanks to him writing his book, he also managed to get a press pass to go into the fair. Needless to say a large section of his show is given over to stories of the somewhat surreal experiences he had at the fair. Some of the key moments though, was when he discovered that several companies were breaking the rules and selling torture equipment through the fair. The remaining part of his show then looks at what he has done in response to both these companies, and also other illegal arms deals that he has discovered. Ultimately, the evidence of all of this was presented to the Quadripartite Select Committee, partly because anything presented to the committee is immune from prosecution, under parliamentary privilege, so for example evidence when presented on TV that could land the TV company in court, can be presented to the committee without fear of prosecution. A transcript of Mark’s appearance before the committee can be found online here, including one point in the proceedings where the chairman of the committee reminds Mark of the Parliamentary privilege, and says that is safe to say things in the forum of the committee, to which one of the other committee members adds the comment “Slander everybodyâ€?.

Signed Copy

I have to say that we are glad we went along to see the show. Although we don’t often go out midweek, I’ve wanted to see Mark live for a long while, and Howard managed to get the last few tickets that were available.

After the show, Mark was signing copies of his book, which I queued up for, and also giving out printed leaflets with the contents of his submission to the Select Committee, which his publisher refused to include in the book. I have to say that I didn’t have much of a conversation with Mark, partly because I did my usual shy and nervous routine at meeting someone famous, and also partly because the people in front had wanted two books, but there was only one left, and Mark was making sure that they would be sent a copy but not charged for postage. One of these days I’ll maybe manage to have a conversation with someone well known in a situation like this, or maybe not!

Beth was suitably inspired to consider what protest she could undertake whilst walking through Parliament Square – the law is such that even wearing a small badge with something that could be taken as political on it is in contravention of the act, and so requires permission. I also thought that maybe Mark would be a bit of a different kind of speaker to have along the next time we have one of the listening to different voices events at the Church. I know there are probably a number of people who would enjoy his material, but others who would object to the language in places. Having said that considering some of the people we have in the Church, it might produce some interesting discussions – we were quite surprised when recently a familiar face from our pews week by week appeared on TV as the senior judge dealing with the recent terror plot!

The show is well worth seeing, and along with details of the book, Mark’s website includes details of the remaining dates on his tour, and further details of his campaign. Oh, and as a little postscript, if you are a teacher having trouble with your classes, Mark did mention that one of the arms dealers he contacted was quite happy to supply pen sized stun devices that would deliver a significant electric shock to a (made up) Catholic school in Ireland. Seriously worrying really…

Politics

Naughty Naughty

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The main story on the front page of the Wokingham Times caused some amusement today. If you live locally you may be aware of an ongoing local issue over a proposed move by the local football club to Cantley Park. As part of the move, they are proposing to build a 250 seat stand for the supporters. On the one hand you have Cantley residents who are objecting to the move, and particularly the seating as it will bring an increase in traffic to their area, and on the other you have people involved with the football club arguing that the local residents are overeacting.

Anyway, as their contribution to the issue, the Wokingham Times has been running a web poll on their website to guage opinion for and against the proposal, the intention being to publish the results. However, their web polling functionality is not exactly advanced, and certainly not secure – indeed anybody with cookies disabled will be able to vote multiple times. Needless to say, that is precisely what has happened. For the ‘Yes’ campaign there have been a number of multiple voters, with the most being 80 from one user. However the prize goes to someone who used their corporate Blackberry to vote ‘No’ a grand total of 664 times.

As a result, the Wokingham Times has replaced their story giving the results with a general grumble about web cheats, and not surprisingly declaring the vote null and void. Having said that, aside from being a lesson in the reliability of web polls as a guage of public opinion, what it does show is quite what strength of feeling there is over the issue on both sides.

Current Affairs, Politics

Wokingham District Housing Consultation

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Development Plan

Today we had one of the periodic communications from our local councillor. Along with a glossy colour brochure telling us what John Redwood, our local MP was up to, we also had an A4 sheet about the current housing consultation. The interesting thing is that housing was one of the big issues in the election this May, with a certain amount of mud slinging from each party accusing the other of wanting to bulldoze the local area. A little over a month ago it all kicked off again, and I explored the arguments in a post back then, so I won’t go over them again now.

What I have done is log on to the councils PlanAccess system – which although I moan quite a bit about the council, is a great tool, and taken a look at the Local Development Framework layer which shows graphically the various proposed developments that are on the list, the changes to green gaps and settlement boundaries, and a confusing array of other information.

I tend to find it easier to work visually, rather than just a dry list of numbers, so I’ve taken a screen grab of our part of the Wokingham District – and it is probably enough to give a lot of local residents in certain parts of the area a few nightmares, and probably isn’t a lot of peoples idea of saying no to housing. However, bear in mind that this isn’t a plan of where houses will be built, it’s all the places that they could be built. Simplifying the explanation of the colours a bit, existing development is in yellow – so you can clearly see Wokingham, and the villages of Barkham and Finchampstead on the map. Slightly confusingly, Arborfield is only a small block of yellow, but this is because the land around Arborfield Garrison is not classified differently, so the existing army housing can be counted as new development. Effectively all the red, blue and pink shading indicates various proposed developments of different classifications.

The red area around Arborfield is just as big as the numbers imply. Finchampstead village itself gets off pretty lightly, but the map shows a good deal of in-filling of current small bits of countryside to the north – so for example you can see the edges of Wokingham merging into Barkham and North Finchampstead on the plan – particularly a development area between the railway and the Finchampstead road is marked. A development on the site of the Ravenswood settlement is shown as well. The plan also indicates development on the south side of the railway to Bracknell – currently Wokingham comes to an abrupt end at the railway, however the remain area between to the south is marked in green. All told, there are still some gaps for countryside, but for certain parts of the district it definitely gives food for thought. If you are a local resident I urge you to take a look at the council website, and to get in touch with them with your opinions on the various areas shown.

Computers/Technology

A Little Bit of Steganography

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isteg-example.jpg

Howard sent round a bit of a plea for help on Friday. He’s writing a report for one of his clients looking at security issues, particular with Internet e-mail systems. They are particularly concerned about important corporate data being leaked via e-mail, whether intentional or not, and Howard was looking for as many different ideas as possible as to ways that information could be sneaked out.

Thinking about it, a lot of the ways that you could hide something would be obvious. For example, if you as an organisation knew that information was leaking, and an e-mail message in code, or even one with some sort of strange zipped attachment, or funny coloured text went through, that would arouse suspicions. What would be needed is a way to hide information in plain sight. What you’re looking at is some sort of steganographic solution. For example a phoney message where key words are identified in some way.

Having said that, the technique is not limited to hiding text within other text. Modern technology brings some much more high technology solutions. One which is reported to have be in common usage by terrorists (indeed in one episode of Sleeper Cell terrorists are sent to particular page on eBay where the plans are encoded into a picture of a rug) to pass information. Essentially what it does is take advantage of the fact that in digital files, even with modern compression techniques there is still some space in the file, for example in a bitmap dark areas of an image where a slight change in the level of darkness would not be discernible, so the image can be doctored to hide other digital data. In other file formats there are parts of the file structure that aren’t used at all. For example these techniques are used by digital watermarking processes to allow photographers to copyright their work electronically and invisibly.

beth.jpg

By this point you’ve probably worked out that the slightly odd choice of picture above is no accident. Using a clever bit of software called iSteg, a front end to a command line tool called OutGuess I’ve encoded a second picture into the first. Obviously the spare capacity is limited, so the second image is a very small, and low quality version of a picture I took of Beth over the summer, however you get the idea. If you don’t believe me, you’ll need a copy of iSteg or an equivalent, and you’ll need to know the password which I have used to lock the secret image, which in this case is ‘test’. If you decode the image with that password, you should get this little snapshot of Beth come out at the end. As Beth said when I showed her, it seems just like the kind of stuff that occurs in sci-fi movies, all on your home computer!

Incidentally, as to the question of whether people are actually hiding information in this way, the people behind OutGuess have an ongoing project to try and detect the use of Steganography on the Internet. According to their site, the search of two million images from eBay auctions and more than a million images on newsgroups found not a single image. For those interested in the technical aspects, the site also includes an academic paper on the search.

Movies & TV

Sleeper Cell

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250px-sleeper_cell_s1.jpg

We’ve just finished watching the first series of Sleeper Cell, a series focusing on an undercover FBI agent, Darwyn al-Sayeed, who infiltrates a terrorist sleeper cell planning an attack on Los Angeles.

On paper, there are a number of thematic similarities with 24 particularly in terms of the location. However although Jack Bauer has been known to go undercover, the real-time format of 24 precludes the kind of development that has occurred with Sleeper Cell. In many ways, Sleeper Cell is probably the more realistic show with a pretty slow burn in terms of the main plot. Having said that, as with most episodic dramas, each one hour episode (although Channel 4 showed them as double episodes), there is a dramatic finale, but without the restriction of the real-time element, they feel a lot less forced – sometimes the fact that the really dramatic stuff happens on the hour in 24 is decidedly false. Another big advantage of Sleeper Cell is that with an 8 episode series, it’s a lot more manageable to watch and keep track of the plot compared to the sprawling conspiracies that have marked out 24 over the years.

Another difference, especially from certain seasons of 24 is that the terrorist cell portrayed is significantly less stereotypical, including a Frenchman, and also an American convert. Compare this to some of the terrorist organisations in 24 who have been populated pretty well exclusively by Arab looking actors. In another interesting twist, Farik, the leader of the cell, is pretending to be Jewish – even training the synagogue softball team. Indeed Oded Fehr, the actor who plays the part is Israeli.

Like 24 they weren’t afraid of killing off key characters, with one member of the terrorist cell not surviving beyond the first episode – and his disappearance being reported to the local Police nearly messing up the entire undercover operation later on in the series. They also quite shockingly killed off Ray Fuller, Darwyn’s FBI supervisor and close friend, in a struggle with a young Afghan boy who Darwyn believed could be saved from becoming a terrorist, but Fuller tried to arrest. In the argument over whether he should be arrested, the young Afghan tries to escape, fatally stabbing Fuller in the process.

Perhaps the more interesting aspects of the series are the flashes you get of the backgrounds of the various cell members. For example Tommy, who looks like the classic all American boy, has a dysfunctional relationship with his parents, with his conversion to radical Islam almost seen as the ultimate rebellion against his parents. We also learn a little about the background of Christian, the French member of the group. We have to wait until the final episodes before we learn more about the background of Farik, when his wife appears on the scene from London. For obvious reasons we find out little about Darwyn, with only a single brief appearance of someone outside the FBI who knows his true identity.

The series has been renewed for a new season, which will see several parallel threads. The first series concluded with Farik imprisoned, and Ilija, the one member of the cell not to be arrested or killed, going on the run, so I imagine we will see Darwyn on a new case, and maybe Ilija and Farik appearing on the scene later on to cause problems. Certainly I’m sure we’ll be watching when the new series makes it’s appearance on UK TV.